"A party for the Blenkers--the Blenkers?"

Mr. Welland laid down his knife and fork and looked anxiously and
incredulously across the luncheon-table at his wife, who, adjusting her
gold eye-glasses, read aloud, in the tone of high comedy:

"Professor and Mrs. Emerson Sillerton request the pleasure of Mr. and
Mrs. Welland's company at the meeting of the Wednesday Afternoon Club
on August 25th at 3 o'clock punctually.  To meet Mrs. and the Misses
Blenker.

"Red Gables, Catherine Street.  R. S. V. P."

"Good gracious--" Mr. Welland gasped, as if a second reading had been
necessary to bring the monstrous absurdity of the thing home to him.

"Poor Amy Sillerton--you never can tell what her husband will do next,"
Mrs. Welland sighed.  "I suppose he's just discovered the Blenkers."

Professor Emerson Sillerton was a thorn in the side of Newport society;
and a thorn that could not be plucked out, for it grew on a venerable
and venerated family tree.  He was, as people said, a man who had had
"every advantage."  His father was Sillerton Jackson's uncle, his
mother a Pennilow of Boston; on each side there was wealth and
position, and mutual suitability.  Nothing--as Mrs. Welland had often
remarked--nothing on earth obliged Emerson Sillerton to be an
archaeologist, or indeed a Professor of any sort, or to live in Newport
in winter, or do any of the other revolutionary things that he did.
But at least, if he was going to break with tradition and flout society
in the face, he need not have married poor Amy Dagonet, who had a right
to expect "something different," and money enough to keep her own
carriage.

No one in the Mingott set could understand why Amy Sillerton had
submitted so tamely to the eccentricities of a husband who filled the
house with long-haired men and short-haired women, and, when he
travelled, took her to explore tombs in Yucatan instead of going to
Paris or Italy.  But there they were, set in their ways, and apparently
unaware that they were different from other people; and when they gave
one of their dreary annual garden-parties every family on the Cliffs,
because of the Sillerton-Pennilow-Dagonet connection, had to draw lots
and send an unwilling representative.

"It's a wonder," Mrs. Welland remarked, "that they didn't choose the
Cup Race day!  Do you remember, two years ago, their giving a party for
a black man on the day of Julia Mingott's the dansant?  Luckily this
time there's nothing else going on that I know of--for of course some
of us will have to go."

Mr. Welland sighed nervously.  "'Some of us,' my dear--more than one?
Three o'clock is such a very awkward hour.  I have to be here at
half-past three to take my drops: it's really no use trying to follow
Bencomb's new treatment if I don't do it systematically; and if I join
you later, of course I shall miss my drive."  At the thought he laid
down his knife and fork again, and a flush of anxiety rose to his
finely-wrinkled cheek.

"There's no reason why you should go at all, my dear," his wife
answered with a cheerfulness that had become automatic.  "I have some
cards to leave at the other end of Bellevue Avenue, and I'll drop in at
about half-past three and stay long enough to make poor Amy feel that
she hasn't been slighted."  She glanced hesitatingly at her daughter.
"And if Newland's afternoon is provided for perhaps May can drive you
out with the ponies, and try their new russet harness."

It was a principle in the Welland family that people's days and hours
should be what Mrs. Welland called "provided for."  The melancholy
possibility of having to "kill time" (especially for those who did not
care for whist or solitaire) was a vision that haunted her as the
spectre of the unemployed haunts the philanthropist.  Another of her
principles was that parents should never (at least visibly) interfere
with the plans of their married children; and the difficulty of
adjusting this respect for May's independence with the exigency of Mr.
Welland's claims could be overcome only by the exercise of an ingenuity
which left not a second of Mrs. Welland's own time unprovided for.

"Of course I'll drive with Papa--I'm sure Newland will find something
to do," May said, in a tone that gently reminded her husband of his
lack of response.  It was a cause of constant distress to Mrs. Welland
that her son-in-law showed so little foresight in planning his days.
Often already, during the fortnight that he had passed under her roof,
when she enquired how he meant to spend his afternoon, he had answered
paradoxically:  "Oh, I think for a change I'll just save it instead of
spending it--" and once, when she and May had had to go on a
long-postponed round of afternoon calls, he had confessed to having
lain all the afternoon under a rock on the beach below the house.

"Newland never seems to look ahead," Mrs. Welland once ventured to
complain to her daughter; and May answered serenely:  "No; but you see
it doesn't matter, because when there's nothing particular to do he
reads a book."

"Ah, yes--like his father!" Mrs. Welland agreed, as if allowing for an
inherited oddity; and after that the question of Newland's unemployment
was tacitly dropped.

Nevertheless, as the day for the Sillerton reception approached, May
began to show a natural solicitude for his welfare, and to suggest a
tennis match at the Chiverses', or a sail on Julius Beaufort's cutter,
as a means of atoning for her temporary desertion.  "I shall be back by
six, you know, dear: Papa never drives later than that--" and she was
not reassured till Archer said that he thought of hiring a run-about
and driving up the island to a stud-farm to look at a second horse for
her brougham.  They had been looking for this horse for some time, and
the suggestion was so acceptable that May glanced at her mother as if
to say:  "You see he knows how to plan out his time as well as any of
us."

The idea of the stud-farm and the brougham horse had germinated in
Archer's mind on the very day when the Emerson Sillerton invitation had
first been mentioned; but he had kept it to himself as if there were
something clandestine in the plan, and discovery might prevent its
execution.  He had, however, taken the precaution to engage in advance
a runabout with a pair of old livery-stable trotters that could still
do their eighteen miles on level roads; and at two o'clock, hastily
deserting the luncheon-table, he sprang into the light carriage and
drove off.

The day was perfect.  A breeze from the north drove little puffs of
white cloud across an ultramarine sky, with a bright sea running under
it.  Bellevue Avenue was empty at that hour, and after dropping the
stable-lad at the corner of Mill Street Archer turned down the Old
Beach Road and drove across Eastman's Beach.

He had the feeling of unexplained excitement with which, on
half-holidays at school, he used to start off into the unknown.  Taking
his pair at an easy gait, he counted on reaching the stud-farm, which
was not far beyond Paradise Rocks, before three o'clock; so that, after
looking over the horse (and trying him if he seemed promising) he would
still have four golden hours to dispose of.

As soon as he heard of the Sillerton's party he had said to himself
that the Marchioness Manson would certainly come to Newport with the
Blenkers, and that Madame Olenska might again take the opportunity of
spending the day with her grandmother.  At any rate, the Blenker
habitation would probably be deserted, and he would be able, without
indiscretion, to satisfy a vague curiosity concerning it.  He was not
sure that he wanted to see the Countess Olenska again; but ever since
he had looked at her from the path above the bay he had wanted,
irrationally and indescribably, to see the place she was living in, and
to follow the movements of her imagined figure as he had watched the
real one in the summer-house.  The longing was with him day and night,
an incessant undefinable craving, like the sudden whim of a sick man
for food or drink once tasted and long since forgotten.  He could not
see beyond the craving, or picture what it might lead to, for he was
not conscious of any wish to speak to Madame Olenska or to hear her
voice.  He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the
spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it,
the rest of the world might seem less empty.

When he reached the stud-farm a glance showed him that the horse was
not what he wanted; nevertheless he took a turn behind it in order to
prove to himself that he was not in a hurry.  But at three o'clock he
shook out the reins over the trotters and turned into the by-roads
leading to Portsmouth.  The wind had dropped and a faint haze on the
horizon showed that a fog was waiting to steal up the Saconnet on the
turn of the tide; but all about him fields and woods were steeped in
golden light.

He drove past grey-shingled farm-houses in orchards, past hay-fields
and groves of oak, past villages with white steeples rising sharply
into the fading sky; and at last, after stopping to ask the way of some
men at work in a field, he turned down a lane between high banks of
goldenrod and brambles.  At the end of the lane was the blue glimmer of
the river; to the left, standing in front of a clump of oaks and
maples, he saw a long tumble-down house with white paint peeling from
its clapboards.

On the road-side facing the gateway stood one of the open sheds in
which the New Englander shelters his farming implements and visitors
"hitch" their "teams." Archer, jumping down, led his pair into the
shed, and after tying them to a post turned toward the house.  The
patch of lawn before it had relapsed into a hay-field; but to the left
an overgrown box-garden full of dahlias and rusty rose-bushes encircled
a ghostly summer-house of trellis-work that had once been white,
surmounted by a wooden Cupid who had lost his bow and arrow but
continued to take ineffectual aim.

Archer leaned for a while against the gate.  No one was in sight, and
not a sound came from the open windows of the house: a grizzled
Newfoundland dozing before the door seemed as ineffectual a guardian as
the arrowless Cupid.  It was strange to think that this place of
silence and decay was the home of the turbulent Blenkers; yet Archer
was sure that he was not mistaken.

For a long time he stood there, content to take in the scene, and
gradually falling under its drowsy spell; but at length he roused
himself to the sense of the passing time.  Should he look his fill and
then drive away?  He stood irresolute, wishing suddenly to see the
inside of the house, so that he might picture the room that Madame
Olenska sat in.  There was nothing to prevent his walking up to the
door and ringing the bell; if, as he supposed, she was away with the
rest of the party, he could easily give his name, and ask permission to
go into the sitting-room to write a message.

But instead, he crossed the lawn and turned toward the box-garden.  As
he entered it he caught sight of something bright-coloured in the
summer-house, and presently made it out to be a pink parasol.  The
parasol drew him like a magnet: he was sure it was hers.  He went into
the summer-house, and sitting down on the rickety seat picked up the
silken thing and looked at its carved handle, which was made of some
rare wood that gave out an aromatic scent.  Archer lifted the handle to
his lips.

He heard a rustle of skirts against the box, and sat motionless,
leaning on the parasol handle with clasped hands, and letting the
rustle come nearer without lifting his eyes.  He had always known that
this must happen ...

"Oh, Mr. Archer!" exclaimed a loud young voice; and looking up he saw
before him the youngest and largest of the Blenker girls, blonde and
blowsy, in bedraggled muslin.  A red blotch on one of her cheeks seemed
to show that it had recently been pressed against a pillow, and her
half-awakened eyes stared at him hospitably but confusedly.

"Gracious--where did you drop from?  I must have been sound asleep in
the hammock.  Everybody else has gone to Newport.  Did you ring?" she
incoherently enquired.

Archer's confusion was greater than hers.  "I--no--that is, I was just
going to.  I had to come up the island to see about a horse, and I
drove over on a chance of finding Mrs. Blenker and your visitors.  But
the house seemed empty--so I sat down to wait."

Miss Blenker, shaking off the fumes of sleep, looked at him with
increasing interest.  "The house IS empty.  Mother's not here, or the
Marchioness--or anybody but me."  Her glance became faintly
reproachful.  "Didn't you know that Professor and Mrs. Sillerton are
giving a garden-party for mother and all of us this afternoon?  It was
too unlucky that I couldn't go; but I've had a sore throat, and mother
was afraid of the drive home this evening.  Did you ever know anything
so disappointing?  Of course," she added gaily, "I shouldn't have
minded half as much if I'd known you were coming."

Symptoms of a lumbering coquetry became visible in her, and Archer
found the strength to break in:  "But Madame Olenska--has she gone to
Newport too?"

Miss Blenker looked at him with surprise.  "Madame Olenska--didn't you
know she'd been called away?"

"Called away?--"

"Oh, my best parasol!  I lent it to that goose of a Katie, because it
matched her ribbons, and the careless thing must have dropped it here.
We Blenkers are all like that ... real Bohemians!"  Recovering the
sunshade with a powerful hand she unfurled it and suspended its rosy
dome above her head.  "Yes, Ellen was called away yesterday: she lets
us call her Ellen, you know.  A telegram came from Boston: she said she
might be gone for two days.  I do LOVE the way she does her hair, don't
you?" Miss Blenker rambled on.

Archer continued to stare through her as though she had been
transparent.  All he saw was the trumpery parasol that arched its
pinkness above her giggling head.

After a moment he ventured:  "You don't happen to know why Madame
Olenska went to Boston?  I hope it was not on account of bad news?"

Miss Blenker took this with a cheerful incredulity.  "Oh, I don't
believe so.  She didn't tell us what was in the telegram.  I think she
didn't want the Marchioness to know.  She's so romantic-looking, isn't
she?  Doesn't she remind you of Mrs. Scott-Siddons when she reads 'Lady
Geraldine's Courtship'?  Did you never hear her?"

Archer was dealing hurriedly with crowding thoughts.  His whole future
seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless
emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever
to happen.  He glanced about him at the unpruned garden, the
tumble-down house, and the oak-grove under which the dusk was
gathering.  It had seemed so exactly the place in which he ought to
have found Madame Olenska; and she was far away, and even the pink
sunshade was not hers ...

He frowned and hesitated.  "You don't know, I suppose--I shall be in
Boston tomorrow.  If I could manage to see her--"

He felt that Miss Blenker was losing interest in him, though her smile
persisted.  "Oh, of course; how lovely of you!  She's staying at the
Parker House; it must be horrible there in this weather."

After that Archer was but intermittently aware of the remarks they
exchanged.  He could only remember stoutly resisting her entreaty that
he should await the returning family and have high tea with them before
he drove home.  At length, with his hostess still at his side, he
passed out of range of the wooden Cupid, unfastened his horses and
drove off.  At the turn of the lane he saw Miss Blenker standing at the
gate and waving the pink parasol.

The next morning, when Archer got out of the Fall River train, he
emerged upon a steaming midsummer Boston.  The streets near the station
were full of the smell of beer and coffee and decaying fruit and a
shirt-sleeved populace moved through them with the intimate abandon of
boarders going down the passage to the bathroom.

Archer found a cab and drove to the Somerset Club for breakfast.  Even
the fashionable quarters had the air of untidy domesticity to which no
excess of heat ever degrades the European cities.  Care-takers in
calico lounged on the door-steps of the wealthy, and the Common looked
like a pleasure-ground on the morrow of a Masonic picnic.  If Archer
had tried to imagine Ellen Olenska in improbable scenes he could not
have called up any into which it was more difficult to fit her than
this heat-prostrated and deserted Boston.

He breakfasted with appetite and method, beginning with a slice of
melon, and studying a morning paper while he waited for his toast and
scrambled eggs.  A new sense of energy and activity had possessed him
ever since he had announced to May the night before that he had
business in Boston, and should take the Fall River boat that night and
go on to New York the following evening.  It had always been understood
that he would return to town early in the week, and when he got back
from his expedition to Portsmouth a letter from the office, which fate
had conspicuously placed on a corner of the hall table, sufficed to
justify his sudden change of plan.  He was even ashamed of the ease
with which the whole thing had been done: it reminded him, for an
uncomfortable moment, of Lawrence Lefferts's masterly contrivances for
securing his freedom.  But this did not long trouble him, for he was
not in an analytic mood.

After breakfast he smoked a cigarette and glanced over the Commercial
Advertiser.  While he was thus engaged two or three men he knew came
in, and the usual greetings were exchanged: it was the same world after
all, though he had such a queer sense of having slipped through the
meshes of time and space.

He looked at his watch, and finding that it was half-past nine got up
and went into the writing-room.  There he wrote a few lines, and
ordered a messenger to take a cab to the Parker House and wait for the
answer.  He then sat down behind another newspaper and tried to
calculate how long it would take a cab to get to the Parker House.

"The lady was out, sir," he suddenly heard a waiter's voice at his
elbow; and he stammered:  "Out?--" as if it were a word in a strange
language.

He got up and went into the hall.  It must be a mistake: she could not
be out at that hour.  He flushed with anger at his own stupidity: why
had he not sent the note as soon as he arrived?

He found his hat and stick and went forth into the street.  The city
had suddenly become as strange and vast and empty as if he were a
traveller from distant lands.  For a moment he stood on the door-step
hesitating; then he decided to go to the Parker House.  What if the
messenger had been misinformed, and she were still there?

He started to walk across the Common; and on the first bench, under a
tree, he saw her sitting.  She had a grey silk sunshade over her
head--how could he ever have imagined her with a pink one?  As he
approached he was struck by her listless attitude: she sat there as if
she had nothing else to do.  He saw her drooping profile, and the knot
of hair fastened low in the neck under her dark hat, and the long
wrinkled glove on the hand that held the sunshade.  He came a step or
two nearer, and she turned and looked at him.

"Oh"--she said; and for the first time he noticed a startled look on
her face; but in another moment it gave way to a slow smile of wonder
and contentment.

"Oh"--she murmured again, on a different note, as he stood looking down
at her; and without rising she made a place for him on the bench.

"I'm here on business--just got here," Archer explained; and, without
knowing why, he suddenly began to feign astonishment at seeing her.
"But what on earth are you doing in this wilderness?"  He had really no
idea what he was saying: he felt as if he were shouting at her across
endless distances, and she might vanish again before he could overtake
her.

"I?  Oh, I'm here on business too," she answered, turning her head
toward him so that they were face to face.  The words hardly reached
him: he was aware only of her voice, and of the startling fact that not
an echo of it had remained in his memory.  He had not even remembered
that it was low-pitched, with a faint roughness on the consonants.

"You do your hair differently," he said, his heart beating as if he had
uttered something irrevocable.

"Differently?  No--it's only that I do it as best I can when I'm
without Nastasia."

"Nastasia; but isn't she with you?"

"No; I'm alone.  For two days it was not worth while to bring her."

"You're alone--at the Parker House?"

She looked at him with a flash of her old malice.  "Does it strike you
as dangerous?"

"No; not dangerous--"

"But unconventional?  I see; I suppose it is."  She considered a
moment.  "I hadn't thought of it, because I've just done something so
much more unconventional." The faint tinge of irony lingered in her
eyes.  "I've just refused to take back a sum of money--that belonged to
me."

Archer sprang up and moved a step or two away.  She had furled her
parasol and sat absently drawing patterns on the gravel.  Presently he
came back and stood before her.

"Some one--has come here to meet you?"

"Yes."

"With this offer?"

She nodded.

"And you refused--because of the conditions?"

"I refused," she said after a moment.

He sat down by her again.  "What were the conditions?"

"Oh, they were not onerous: just to sit at the head of his table now
and then."

There was another interval of silence.  Archer's heart had slammed
itself shut in the queer way it had, and he sat vainly groping for a
word.

"He wants you back--at any price?"

"Well--a considerable price.  At least the sum is considerable for me."

He paused again, beating about the question he felt he must put.

"It was to meet him here that you came?"

She stared, and then burst into a laugh.  "Meet him--my husband?  HERE?
At this season he's always at Cowes or Baden."

"He sent some one?"

"Yes."

"With a letter?"

She shook her head.  "No; just a message.  He never writes.  I don't
think I've had more than one letter from him."  The allusion brought
the colour to her cheek, and it reflected itself in Archer's vivid
blush.

"Why does he never write?"

"Why should he?  What does one have secretaries for?"

The young man's blush deepened.  She had pronounced the word as if it
had no more significance than any other in her vocabulary.  For a
moment it was on the tip of his tongue to ask:  "Did he send his
secretary, then?"  But the remembrance of Count Olenski's only letter
to his wife was too present to him.  He paused again, and then took
another plunge.

"And the person?"--

"The emissary?  The emissary," Madame Olenska rejoined, still smiling,
"might, for all I care, have left already; but he has insisted on
waiting till this evening ... in case ... on the chance ..."

"And you came out here to think the chance over?"

"I came out to get a breath of air.  The hotel's too stifling.  I'm
taking the afternoon train back to Portsmouth."

They sat silent, not looking at each other, but straight ahead at the
people passing along the path.  Finally she turned her eyes again to
his face and said:  "You're not changed."

He felt like answering:  "I was, till I saw you again;" but instead he
stood up abruptly and glanced about him at the untidy sweltering park.

"This is horrible.  Why shouldn't we go out a little on the bay?
There's a breeze, and it will be cooler.  We might take the steamboat
down to Point Arley."  She glanced up at him hesitatingly and he went
on:  "On a Monday morning there won't be anybody on the boat.  My train
doesn't leave till evening: I'm going back to New York.  Why shouldn't
we?" he insisted, looking down at her; and suddenly he broke out:
"Haven't we done all we could?"

"Oh"--she murmured again.  She stood up and reopened her sunshade,
glancing about her as if to take counsel of the scene, and assure
herself of the impossibility of remaining in it.  Then her eyes
returned to his face.  "You mustn't say things like that to me," she
said.

"I'll say anything you like; or nothing.  I won't open my mouth unless
you tell me to.  What harm can it do to anybody?  All I want is to
listen to you," he stammered.

She drew out a little gold-faced watch on an enamelled chain.  "Oh,
don't calculate," he broke out; "give me the day!  I want to get you
away from that man.  At what time was he coming?"

Her colour rose again.  "At eleven."

"Then you must come at once."

"You needn't be afraid--if I don't come."

"Nor you either--if you do.  I swear I only want to hear about you, to
know what you've been doing.  It's a hundred years since we've met--it
may be another hundred before we meet again."

She still wavered, her anxious eyes on his face.  "Why didn't you come
down to the beach to fetch me, the day I was at Granny's?" she asked.

"Because you didn't look round--because you didn't know I was there.  I
swore I wouldn't unless you looked round."  He laughed as the
childishness of the confession struck him.

"But I didn't look round on purpose."

"On purpose?"

"I knew you were there; when you drove in I recognised the ponies.  So
I went down to the beach."

"To get away from me as far as you could?"

She repeated in a low voice:  "To get away from you as far as I could."

He laughed out again, this time in boyish satisfaction.  "Well, you see
it's no use.  I may as well tell you," he added, "that the business I
came here for was just to find you.  But, look here, we must start or
we shall miss our boat."

"Our boat?"  She frowned perplexedly, and then smiled.  "Oh, but I must
go back to the hotel first:  I must leave a note--"

"As many notes as you please.  You can write here." He drew out a
note-case and one of the new stylographic pens.  "I've even got an
envelope--you see how everything's predestined!  There--steady the
thing on your knee, and I'll get the pen going in a second.  They have
to be humoured; wait--"  He banged the hand that held the pen against
the back of the bench.  "It's like jerking down the mercury in a
thermometer: just a trick.  Now try--"

She laughed, and bending over the sheet of paper which he had laid on
his note-case, began to write.  Archer walked away a few steps, staring
with radiant unseeing eyes at the passersby, who, in their turn, paused
to stare at the unwonted sight of a fashionably-dressed lady writing a
note on her knee on a bench in the Common.

Madame Olenska slipped the sheet into the envelope, wrote a name on it,
and put it into her pocket.  Then she too stood up.

They walked back toward Beacon Street, and near the club Archer caught
sight of the plush-lined "herdic" which had carried his note to the
Parker House, and whose driver was reposing from this effort by bathing
his brow at the corner hydrant.

"I told you everything was predestined!  Here's a cab for us.  You
see!"  They laughed, astonished at the miracle of picking up a public
conveyance at that hour, and in that unlikely spot, in a city where
cab-stands were still a "foreign" novelty.

Archer, looking at his watch, saw that there was time to drive to the
Parker House before going to the steamboat landing.  They rattled
through the hot streets and drew up at the door of the hotel.

Archer held out his hand for the letter.  "Shall I take it in?" he
asked; but Madame Olenska, shaking her head, sprang out and disappeared
through the glazed doors.  It was barely half-past ten; but what if the
emissary, impatient for her reply, and not knowing how else to employ
his time, were already seated among the travellers with cooling drinks
at their elbows of whom Archer had caught a glimpse as she went in?

He waited, pacing up and down before the herdic.  A Sicilian youth with
eyes like Nastasia's offered to shine his boots, and an Irish matron to
sell him peaches; and every few moments the doors opened to let out hot
men with straw hats tilted far back, who glanced at him as they went
by.  He marvelled that the door should open so often, and that all the
people it let out should look so like each other, and so like all the
other hot men who, at that hour, through the length and breadth of the
land, were passing continuously in and out of the swinging doors of
hotels.

And then, suddenly, came a face that he could not relate to the other
faces.  He caught but a flash of it, for his pacings had carried him to
the farthest point of his beat, and it was in turning back to the hotel
that he saw, in a group of typical countenances--the lank and weary,
the round and surprised, the lantern-jawed and mild--this other face
that was so many more things at once, and things so different.  It was
that of a young man, pale too, and half-extinguished by the heat, or
worry, or both, but somehow, quicker, vivider, more conscious; or
perhaps seeming so because he was so different.  Archer hung a moment
on a thin thread of memory, but it snapped and floated off with the
disappearing face--apparently that of some foreign business man,
looking doubly foreign in such a setting.  He vanished in the stream of
passersby, and Archer resumed his patrol.

He did not care to be seen watch in hand within view of the hotel, and
his unaided reckoning of the lapse of time led him to conclude that, if
Madame Olenska was so long in reappearing, it could only be because she
had met the emissary and been waylaid by him.  At the thought Archer's
apprehension rose to anguish.

"If she doesn't come soon I'll go in and find her," he said.

The doors swung open again and she was at his side.  They got into the
herdic, and as it drove off he took out his watch and saw that she had
been absent just three minutes.  In the clatter of loose windows that
made talk impossible they bumped over the disjointed cobblestones to
the wharf.

Seated side by side on a bench of the half-empty boat they found that
they had hardly anything to say to each other, or rather that what they
had to say communicated itself best in the blessed silence of their
release and their isolation.

As the paddle-wheels began to turn, and wharves and shipping to recede
through the veil of heat, it seemed to Archer that everything in the
old familiar world of habit was receding also.  He longed to ask Madame
Olenska if she did not have the same feeling: the feeling that they
were starting on some long voyage from which they might never return.
But he was afraid to say it, or anything else that might disturb the
delicate balance of her trust in him.  In reality he had no wish to
betray that trust.  There had been days and nights when the memory of
their kiss had burned and burned on his lips; the day before even, on
the drive to Portsmouth, the thought of her had run through him like
fire; but now that she was beside him, and they were drifting forth
into this unknown world, they seemed to have reached the kind of deeper
nearness that a touch may sunder.

As the boat left the harbour and turned seaward a breeze stirred about
them and the bay broke up into long oily undulations, then into ripples
tipped with spray.  The fog of sultriness still hung over the city, but
ahead lay a fresh world of ruffled waters, and distant promontories
with light-houses in the sun.  Madame Olenska, leaning back against the
boat-rail, drank in the coolness between parted lips.  She had wound a
long veil about her hat, but it left her face uncovered, and Archer was
struck by the tranquil gaiety of her expression.  She seemed to take
their adventure as a matter of course, and to be neither in fear of
unexpected encounters, nor (what was worse) unduly elated by their
possibility.

In the bare dining-room of the inn, which he had hoped they would have
to themselves, they found a strident party of innocent-looking young
men and women--school-teachers on a holiday, the landlord told
them--and Archer's heart sank at the idea of having to talk through
their noise.

"This is hopeless--I'll ask for a private room," he said; and Madame
Olenska, without offering any objection, waited while he went in search
of it.  The room opened on a long wooden verandah, with the sea coming
in at the windows.  It was bare and cool, with a table covered with a
coarse checkered cloth and adorned by a bottle of pickles and a
blueberry pie under a cage.  No more guileless-looking cabinet
particulier ever offered its shelter to a clandestine couple: Archer
fancied he saw the sense of its reassurance in the faintly amused smile
with which Madame Olenska sat down opposite to him.  A woman who had
run away from her husband--and reputedly with another man--was likely
to have mastered the art of taking things for granted; but something in
the quality of her composure took the edge from his irony.  By being so
quiet, so unsurprised and so simple she had managed to brush away the
conventions and make him feel that to seek to be alone was the natural
thing for two old friends who had so much to say to each other....

They lunched slowly and meditatively, with mute intervals between
rushes of talk; for, the spell once broken, they had much to say, and
yet moments when saying became the mere accompaniment to long duologues
of silence.  Archer kept the talk from his own affairs, not with
conscious intention but because he did not want to miss a word of her
history; and leaning on the table, her chin resting on her clasped
hands, she talked to him of the year and a half since they had met.

She had grown tired of what people called "society"; New York was kind,
it was almost oppressively hospitable; she should never forget the way
in which it had welcomed her back; but after the first flush of novelty
she had found herself, as she phrased it, too "different" to care for
the things it cared about--and so she had decided to try Washington,
where one was supposed to meet more varieties of people and of opinion.
And on the whole she should probably settle down in Washington, and
make a home there for poor Medora, who had worn out the patience of all
her other relations just at the time when she most needed looking after
and protecting from matrimonial perils.

"But Dr. Carver--aren't you afraid of Dr. Carver?  I hear he's been
staying with you at the Blenkers'."

She smiled.  "Oh, the Carver danger is over.  Dr. Carver is a very
clever man.  He wants a rich wife to finance his plans, and Medora is
simply a good advertisement as a convert."

"A convert to what?"

"To all sorts of new and crazy social schemes.  But, do you know, they
interest me more than the blind conformity to tradition--somebody
else's tradition--that I see among our own friends.  It seems stupid to
have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another
country."  She smiled across the table.  "Do you suppose Christopher
Columbus would have taken all that trouble just to go to the Opera with
the Selfridge Merrys?"

Archer changed colour.  "And Beaufort--do you say these things to
Beaufort?" he asked abruptly.

"I haven't seen him for a long time.  But I used to; and he
understands."

"Ah, it's what I've always told you; you don't like us. And you like
Beaufort because he's so unlike us." He looked about the bare room and
out at the bare beach and the row of stark white village houses strung
along the shore.  "We're damnably dull.  We've no character, no colour,
no variety.--I wonder," he broke out, "why you don't go back?"

Her eyes darkened, and he expected an indignant rejoinder.  But she sat
silent, as if thinking over what he had said, and he grew frightened
lest she should answer that she wondered too.

At length she said:  "I believe it's because of you."

It was impossible to make the confession more dispassionately, or in a
tone less encouraging to the vanity of the person addressed.  Archer
reddened to the temples, but dared not move or speak: it was as if her
words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive
off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock about it if it
were left undisturbed.

"At least," she continued, "it was you who made me understand that
under the dullness there are things so fine and sensitive and delicate
that even those I most cared for in my other life look cheap in
comparison.  I don't know how to explain myself"--she drew together her
troubled brows--"but it seems as if I'd never before understood with
how much that is hard and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasures
may be paid."

"Exquisite pleasures--it's something to have had them!" he felt like
retorting; but the appeal in her eyes kept him silent.

"I want," she went on, "to be perfectly honest with you--and with
myself.  For a long time I've hoped this chance would come: that I
might tell you how you've helped me, what you've made of me--"

Archer sat staring beneath frowning brows.  He interrupted her with a
laugh.  "And what do you make out that you've made of me?"

She paled a little.  "Of you?"

"Yes: for I'm of your making much more than you ever were of mine.  I'm
the man who married one woman because another one told him to."

Her paleness turned to a fugitive flush.  "I thought--you promised--you
were not to say such things today."

"Ah--how like a woman!  None of you will ever see a bad business
through!"

She lowered her voice.  "IS it a bad business--for May?"

He stood in the window, drumming against the raised sash, and feeling
in every fibre the wistful tenderness with which she had spoken her
cousin's name.

"For that's the thing we've always got to think of--haven't we--by your
own showing?" she insisted.

"My own showing?" he echoed, his blank eyes still on the sea.

"Or if not," she continued, pursuing her own thought with a painful
application, "if it's not worth while to have given up, to have missed
things, so that others may be saved from disillusionment and
misery--then everything I came home for, everything that made my other
life seem by contrast so bare and so poor because no one there took
account of them--all these things are a sham or a dream--"

He turned around without moving from his place.  "And in that case
there's no reason on earth why you shouldn't go back?" he concluded for
her.

Her eyes were clinging to him desperately.  "Oh, IS there no reason?"

"Not if you staked your all on the success of my marriage.  My
marriage," he said savagely, "isn't going to be a sight to keep you
here."  She made no answer, and he went on:  "What's the use?  You gave
me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me
to go on with a sham one.  It's beyond human enduring--that's all."

"Oh, don't say that; when I'm enduring it!" she burst out, her eyes
filling.

Her arms had dropped along the table, and she sat with her face
abandoned to his gaze as if in the recklessness of a desperate peril.
The face exposed her as much as if it had been her whole person, with
the soul behind it: Archer stood dumb, overwhelmed by what it suddenly
told him.

"You too--oh, all this time, you too?"

For answer, she let the tears on her lids overflow and run slowly
downward.

Half the width of the room was still between them, and neither made any
show of moving.  Archer was conscious of a curious indifference to her
bodily presence: he would hardly have been aware of it if one of the
hands she had flung out on the table had not drawn his gaze as on the
occasion when, in the little Twenty-third Street house, he had kept his
eye on it in order not to look at her face.  Now his imagination spun
about the hand as about the edge of a vortex; but still he made no
effort to draw nearer.  He had known the love that is fed on caresses
and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not
to be superficially satisfied.  His one terror was to do anything which
might efface the sound and impression of her words; his one thought,
that he should never again feel quite alone.

But after a moment the sense of waste and ruin overcame him.  There
they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their
separate destinies that they might as well have been half the world
apart.

"What's the use--when you will go back?" he broke out, a great hopeless
HOW ON EARTH CAN I KEEP YOU?  crying out to her beneath his words.

She sat motionless, with lowered lids.  "Oh--I shan't go yet!"

"Not yet?  Some time, then?  Some time that you already foresee?"

At that she raised her clearest eyes.  "I promise you: not as long as
you hold out.  Not as long as we can look straight at each other like
this."

He dropped into his chair.  What her answer really said was:  "If you
lift a finger you'll drive me back: back to all the abominations you
know of, and all the temptations you half guess."  He understood it as
clearly as if she had uttered the words, and the thought kept him
anchored to his side of the table in a kind of moved and sacred
submission.

"What a life for you!--" he groaned.

"Oh--as long as it's a part of yours."

"And mine a part of yours?"

She nodded.

"And that's to be all--for either of us?"

"Well; it IS all, isn't it?"

At that he sprang up, forgetting everything but the sweetness of her
face.  She rose too, not as if to meet him or to flee from him, but
quietly, as though the worst of the task were done and she had only to
wait; so quietly that, as he came close, her outstretched hands acted
not as a check but as a guide to him.  They fell into his, while her
arms, extended but not rigid, kept him far enough off to let her
surrendered face say the rest.

They may have stood in that way for a long time, or only for a few
moments; but it was long enough for her silence to communicate all she
had to say, and for him to feel that only one thing mattered.  He must
do nothing to make this meeting their last; he must leave their future
in her care, asking only that she should keep fast hold of it.

"Don't--don't be unhappy," she said, with a break in her voice, as she
drew her hands away; and he answered:  "You won't go back--you won't go
back?" as if it were the one possibility he could not bear.

"I won't go back," she said; and turning away she opened the door and
led the way into the public dining-room.

The strident school-teachers were gathering up their possessions
preparatory to a straggling flight to the wharf; across the beach lay
the white steam-boat at the pier; and over the sunlit waters Boston
loomed in a line of haze.

Archer soon finds life in Newport to be predictably dull, and he is forced to find trivial ways to fill up his long and unemployed days. He successfully avoids one of many ubiquitous social obligations by driving out into the country to find a new horse for his carriage. Unsuccessful in his search, he finds himself with the remainder of his day free. He has had a vague longing to simply see where Ellen has been staying and find out how she has been spending her days, and so he decides to visit the house where she has been staying. No one is home when he arrives at the house. In the summer house, he spies a pink parasol that he instantly assumes belongs to Ellen. As he bends to kiss it, he is suddenly interrupted by the daughter of the house. Embarrassed by his foolishness, he inquires as to the whereabouts of Ellen. The girl informs him that she was unexpectedly called away to Boston the day before. Back at the Wellands', he announces to May that he will leave for Boston the following day on business. In Boston, Archer spies Ellen sitting in the Common. Surprised to see him, she relates that she is there on business. Her husband is willing to pay a considerable price to have her return to him, and she has until that evening to decide how to respond to his offer. Archer convinces Ellen to spend the day with him. She asks him why he didn't fetch her at the shore that day in Newport. When he answers that it was because she didn't turn around, she responds that she didn't turn around on purpose. She confesses that she had gone to the beach to get as far away from Archer as she could. Later that afternoon, at lunch in a private dining room, Ellen explains herself further. She had grown tired of New York society and felt that by moving to Washington, she would be able to find a wider variety of people and opinions. Archer asks why she does not return to Europe, and she replies that it is because of him. They discuss Archer's marriage, and Ellen claims that she is glad that at least May is happy. Archer responds bitterly that Ellen gave him his first taste of real life at the same time that she asked him to continue a sham life with May. Ellen bursts into tears, confirming that she too has been miserable with their separation. Archer suddenly feels desperate with the thought that he might not be able to see her again. Ellen promises that she will not return to her husband or to Europe as long as she and Newland do not act upon their love for one another.

Back with the Wellands at their Newport home, Archer faces the monotony of his new married life. In Newport, there is very little to do besides attending sports competitions, visiting acquaintances, and running small errands. Ironically, May and her mother have a deep fear of wasting their days, and so they spend them occupied with trivial events. With this constant rush of silly activities to keep them busy, the Wellands do not have to confront any existential questions. Their activities are meaningless and repetitious, but to them this is preferable to confronting larger questions about self-identity or goals in life. May's insistence on living on the very surface of life actually helps Archer on one level. When he decides to visit Ellen in Boston, he knows that May will not question his actions. Whether or not she is aware of her husband's feelings for her cousin, she does not wish to consider the upsetting thought that Archer might be unfaithful. As Archer gives May his justification for traveling, he is surprised to find how easy it is to make excuses. Wharton in fact compares his actions to those of Larry Lefferts, who is a prototypical adulterer. By this comparison, Wharton raises the question: what makes Archer so different from Lefferts? Is Archer exceptional only because the novel is told from his point of view? What is it about his infatuation with Ellen that makes his situation so unique? Upon meeting in Boston, Ellen questions Archer as to why he did not fetch her that day at the beach. To Archer's surprise, she knew that he had seen her at the shore. Archer is pleased. At the beach he had wondered why she didn't turn around, for if he were in her position he would have sensed her presence. Yet the revelation that Ellen had indeed known he was there adds a dimension to the already symbolic scene. The fact that Ellen and Archer did not speak was not due to a chance failure to communicate. Both consciously chose not to speak to each other. Choice, and not chance or fate, prevented them from meeting. Now reunited with Ellen in Boston, Archer finds himself passionately in love with her. These sentiments, however, are remarkably different from the strong feelings he once held for May. While Archer was infatuated with May's youthful beauty, his love for Ellen is not based nearly so much on physical appearances. In fact, upon meeting her, he finds that he has forgotten the sound of her voice. And sitting with her at lunch, he feels a "curious indifference to her bodily presence." Instead, Archer has the sense that "this passion that was closer than his bones was not anything that could be superficially satisfied." His love for Ellen is based just as much on an intellectual and emotional level as it is on a physical level. It is this, Wharton implies, that distinguishes him from randy adulterers like Larry Lefferts.