haunted by the "something" in it, which he thought inexplicable. A remembrance of my own shows this. In my ardent years of exploration and revolt, conditioned by the historical work that occupied me during the later seventies, I once said to him in tête-à-tête, reckoning confidently on his sympathy, and with the intolerance and certainty of youth, that orthodoxy could not possibly maintain itself long against its assailants, especially from the historical and literary camps, and that we should live to see it break down. He shook his head and looked rather troubled. "I don't think so-" he said. Then, with hesitation and we don't altogether agree. You think it's all plain. But I can't. There are such mysterious things. Take that saying, 'Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy-laden.' How can you explain that? There is a mystery in it-something supernatural."

I might have replied I cannot remember whether I did that the answer of the modern critic would be: "The words you quote are in all probability from a lost Wisdom book-there are very close analogies in Proverbs and in the Apocrypha. They are a fragment without a context, and may represent on the Lord's lips, either a quotation, or the text of a discourse. Wisdom is speaking the Wisdom which is justified of her children."" But if any one had made such a reply, it would not have affected the mood in Pater of which this conversation gave me my first glimpse and which is expressed again and again in the most exquisite passages of Marius. Turn to the first time when Marius-under Marcus Aurelius-is present at a Christian ceremony, and sees, for the first time, the "wonderful spectacle of those who believed."

The people here collected might have figured as the earliest handsel or pattern of a new world, from the very face of which discontent had passed away. ... They had faced life and were glad, by some science or light of knowledge they had, to which there was certainly no parallel in the older world. Was some credible message from beyond "the flaming rampart of the world"-a message of hope. . . already molding their very bodies and looks and voices, now and here?

Or again, to the thoughts of Marius at the approach of death:

At this moment, his unclouded receptivity of soul, grown so steadily through all those. years, from experience to experience, was at its height; the house was ready for the possible guest, the tablet of the mind white and smooth, for whatever divine fingers might choose to write there.

Marius was published twelve years after the Studies in the Renaissance, and there is a world between the two books. I may perhaps be allowed to return to the later phases of Pater's thought, when I come to his review of Robert Elsmere, and his precious letter about that book to myself. Here it is rather the middle days of his life that concern me, and the years of happy friendship with him and his sisters, when we were all young together. Mr. Pater and my husband were both fellows and tutors of Brasenose, though my husband was much the younger; a fact which naturally brought us into frequent contact. And the beautiful little house across the road, with its two dear mistresses drew me perpetually, both before and after my marriage. The drawing-room which runs the whole breadth of the house from the road to the garden behind was "Paterian" in every line and ornament. There was a Morris paper; spindlelegged tables and chairs; a sparing allowance of blue plates and pots, bought, I think, in Holland, where Oxford residents in my day were always foraging, to return often with treasures, of which the very memory now stirs a halfamused envy of one's own past self, that had such chance and lost it; framed embroidery of the most delicate design and color, the work of Mr. Pater's elder sister; engravings, if I remember right, from Botticelli or Luini, or Mantegna; a few mirrors, and a very few flowers, chosen and arranged with a simple yet conscious art. I see that room always with the sun in it, touching the polished surfaces of wood and brass and china, and bringing out its pure, bright color. I see it too pervaded by the presence of the younger sister Clara, a personality never to be forgotten by those who loved her. Clara Pater, whose grave and noble beauty in youth has been preserved in a drawing by Mr. Wirgman, was indeed.

a "rare and dedicated spirit." When I first knew her, she was four or five and twenty, intelligent, alive, sympathetic, with a delightful humor, and a strong judgment, but without much positive acquirement. Then after some years, she began to learn Latin and Greek with a view to teaching; and after we left Oxford she became Vice-President of the new Somerville College for Women. Several generations of girl-students must still preserve the tenderest and most grateful memories of all that she was there, as woman, teacher, and friend. Her point of view, her opinion had always the crispness, the savor that goes with perfect sincerity. She feared no one, and she loved many, as they loved her. She loved animals too, as all the household did. How well I remember the devoted nursing given by the brother and sisters to a poor little

paralytic cat, whose life they tried to save-in vain! When, later, I came across in Marius the account of Marcus

Aurelius carrying away the dead child Annius Verus,Annius Verus,-"pressed closely to his bosom, as if yearning just then for one thing only, to be united, to be absolutely one with it, in its obscure distress' I remembered the absorption of the writer of those lines, and of his sisters, in the suffering of that poor little creature, long years before. I feel tolerably certain that in writing the words Walter Pater had that past experience in mind.

After Walter Pater's death Clara, with her elder sister, became the vigilant and joint guardian of her brother's books and fame, till, four years ago, a terrible illness cut short her life, and set free, in her brother's words, the "unclouded and receptive soul."

IN

HOUGH the sloop lay at anchor in a tidy place, well under the reef, there hung about her person an air of singular untidiness. The halyards had been let go and that was all; the mainsail lay all over the port side where it had come bellying below, the staysail had jammed three-quarters down, and the jib was fouled in the bobstay. There was no sound. Had the two men, the one on deck and the one in the cubby, been interested they could have heard the tradewind slatting the fronds of the cocoapalms away on the beach, where they began to stand out now on the gray that comes and goes swiftly before the West Indian dawn.

By her rig she would have come from one of the French islands. Marie Galante, in fact, was the hailing port given under the name, La Reine de la Mer on the battered stern. But it was at Guadeloupe that they had the pestilence-La Vérette.

The two words, "La Vérette," had been the last on the black man's lips and that was an hour ago. Now he lay quite still beside the wheel-box, his head and his satiny shoulders doubled over toward his middle, making a figure not unlike a question-mark, an awkward interrogation put to the sky.

In the sloop's cubby the air was already heavy with abomination. The body in the bunk athwartships had been the property of a white man, though it would have been hard to say it now, for the lovers of La Vérette come masked to the tryst. By his clothing he might have been a commercial traveler. Or he might have been a tourist, cut off from his ship by the smallpox and taking any means of escape from the pestilent city. He might, indeed, have been anything. By the plain gold ring on his left hand he would have been "W. E. C.," unless

by chance he were "M. C." And the papers in the inner pocket of his coat would have settled that-would have fixed him for Waldo Emerson Fellows, an American traveling in the Caribbean "for pleasure" or possibly for another reason. It mattered very little now. . .

Day came swiftly. Light fell out of the zenith, and in an instant the world was on fire with a white and pitiless flame. It showed the raw, hard, peacockcolored sea; it showed the beach livid where the palms threw it in shadow. It picked out a skiff half-beached on the sand and beside it the figure of a white man, sitting cross-legged and staring out over the water at the sloop under the reef. His eyes were wide and the lids crusted, as if it had been a long time since they had winked.

Seeming by a gesture of the head to realize for the first time that night was done, he made an attempt to get up, and finally did get up and started off unsteadily across the sand. But when he had gone a few steps he came back and looked at the sloop and at the skiff. He did not want the skiff there. He set about casting it adrift. He made hard work of it; pain furrowed his brow and perspiration filled the furrows. When he had got it free at last he remained watching till the wind had taken hold of it. Then, lurching slightly from side to side, he went back up the sand and entered among the trees. He stumbled once over a log hidden in creepers and lay prone for a while, himself half-hidden by the creepers. The heavy, vegetal breath of the jungle enveloped him.

About noon a torrential rain came down from the mountain and erased from the beach the footprints and the scar of the boat's keel, leaving the sand unmarred again as it had been for years out of mind, and as it was to remain for other years out of mind under the empty Caribbean sky.

There was something not altogether right about the creole planter Basil. He was certainly not a native of Dominica, where his lime-groves clung to the shoulder of a wild green mountain, nor was it probable that he had come from any other of the British colonies. It was vaguely presumed that he had originated in some one of the French islands. Noémi, the fille de couleur from Martinique, had it in her head that this was not so, for he was never comfortable in the patois. But, after all, who was Noémi?

He had just now arisen from his noonday nap. As he sat in his pajamas at the writing-table in the big, cool, graytimbered room, one finger tapping idly on the tumbler of lime and gin which Noémi had brought with her customary low "Bonsoué, doudoux'-seeing him so one could not have said that he was even by the faintest hint "out of the picture." Tall, spare, very slow of movement, his eyes cavernous under a rank growth of brows, his pock-pitted face showing the saving pallor under its tan (for only the bloodless may live in the tropics), he was no more nor less by a shade than the creole limeplanter of the British Caribbees. And more telling perhaps than any of these physical stigmata was the fact that, although there was a great stack of work on the desk to be got through, and though it was certain it would be got through, yet he could remain stretched out in his chair now for upward of an empty hour, his finger tapping on the glass, his eyes dreaming on the tumbled blue and green ravines sprawling up beyond the valley of the Roseau...

"What is it?" he asked, after that time, feeling rather than hearing Noémi's soft approach.

"A man for see you, ché."

"Yes-yes-" He lifted the tumbler, drank, and set it down. "Yes? Right! Where is he? What does he want? Eh?" "He rest in carriage there, doudoux. See, it is a letter."

Basil tore open the envelope and perused the contents, following the lines aloud and bringing up each sentence with a "So? H'mmm!"

"It's the under-manager," he explained. "I wanted the Fruit people to

send somebody out- So! H'mmm! By the Royal Mail, eh? That must have been the Chignecto came in. So! H'mmm! Bitterhouse, eh? 'Allen Kay Bitter-"" He lay with his mouth halfopen while the watch at his elbow ticked a dozen seconds away. Then, mechanically, his breath came, bringing out the remainder of the word, "-house!""

He lifted his head and looked at Noémi. Ordinarily she would have smiled, being looked at. Now, instead of smiling, she uttered a brief, vibrant syllable of interrogation.

He made no answer; perhaps he had not heard. Getting to his feet, he groped for the table, but the thing had somehow got around on the wrong side of him. "Damn! I'm not well, 'Ti. I-I'm knocked out, 'Ti. I—I—” Still groping, he started to walk toward the door of his own room.

وو

"I don't want him. I I've changed my mind. I say- Devil take it! I don't want him. Tell him to go 'way. 'Ti! Do you hear? Damn it all!"

Even his anger went to pieces. "Noémi! 'Ti Noémi-tell him to go 'way-for God's sake, 'Ti-"

He seemed to realize that he was making a fool of himself. Returning to the chair, he sat down. His fingers, where they gripped the arms, showed bluish white.

"This won't do. Let me think. Let me think."

But he could not think. The watch on the table ticked the seconds away, the ponderous minutes, and there was not time to think. A diffused brilliance, the huge sunlight of the tropic afternoon cast upward from a hundred million leaves, molded the detail of his features.

Bitterhouse, the American, had grown tired of waiting in the sun. Basil heard footfalls, but he seemed unable to move. From the doorway at his right there came a sound like a sob, or not so much a sob as like a deep breath broken suddenly by the closing of teeth and lips.

After a moment the planter said "Yes?" without turning his head. When the silence continued he repeated it: "Yes? Yes?"

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Basil? I— You have my credentials?"

"Yes, yes. A pleasure, I assure you,

They talked. To Noémi, a familiar presence in the background, it seemed almost that they talked too much, too well. In the common run of conversation there will come pauses from moment to moment, needing no defense, or else filling themselves easily with an interchange of glances. But there were no pauses now, no silences to be filled up. It seemed to Noémi, indeed, that each of them was definitely not meeting the other's eyes. And as they continued their abstracted give and take their - faces betrayed the working of a subtle change; in the huge refracted light they grew pinched and more and more bloodless and dry, like paper masks-till one of them crumpled.

It was Bitterhouse. He got to his feet so abruptly as to overturn his chair, and the clatter set him off in a shivering fit. "Good God!" he stammered. "This is-terrible!"

His face was no longer dry; sweat poured down his cheeks. Careless of everything, he started headlong for the door, but stopped before he reached it and whirled about-face.

"No, I'm not crazy! I tell you, I am not crazy! Do you think I'm a fool-a crazy, blind fool? I know! I know as well as anybody that Waldo Fellows is dead-dead and buried a good ten years. And more! Eleven years!"

If he was not crazy, he was very near it. The words came tumbling out of his mouth.

"Don't tell me-don't try to tell me you're not—"

The planter passed a hand over his eyes, and then, rising slowly, turned to face the charge.

"All right.' His voice sounded unstrung and weary. "Yes, Kay. Yes. All right."

Night came. Under the darkness the twisted cardboard mountains seemed not to recede, but rather to press close and topple higher over the roofs of the estate. It was a little cooler, but heavy,

the air struck through with the sweet, dank breath of vegetation. Showerwhispers came and went, glittering across the starlight. From the veranda the river could be heard tumbling in the gorge a thousand feet below; and other sounds, low rustlings and hissings and twitterings, a single far ululation, all the multitudinous small life of the mountain jungles awakening to the dark. The voices on the veranda rose and fell in uneven periods, mingling with the wide orchestration.

"And so, seeing the fellow was done for, I slipped my ring on his finger and stuck a few papers in his pocket and came away. I was sick, too darn near died myself, Kay. And that would have been a joke. . . . But tell me how did they all take it, eh?” Bitterhouse answered with deliberation, still picking his words.

"Well, you may imagine. You see we had the news of your-well, your death, the better part of a month before the-the-"

"Before the examiner happened to get around to my books, eh? And that made a-difference."

...

"Well, in the nature of things-" 'Surely, surely. How about Pete Noyes? Ever amount to anything, after all? And the Breckenridge girls—

Their voices went on, rambling, disembodied, without end. To a casual listener there would have seemed no pattern in it all, no intention. And yet there was a pattern and an intention, a growing uneasiness, a definite avoidance. The tiny night-noises seemed to withdraw, leaving an electric silence. Pauses multiplied, each longer and more unmanageable than the last, and all but one of them bringing up with a labored something that meant nothing. This one the planter ended by sitting up suddenly in his hammock.

"Ti!" he called. His voice was sharp and pitched too high.

Noémi, rising out of the near dark, came to his side.

"Ti, see here. I'm sure Mr. Bitterhouse could do with a punch, and I'm dry, too. Your own, now; that's a good girl. That black boy in the pantry is too long on the sugar-much. Eh?"

"Oui, Missie Basil-Fallows!" she