The sun was streaming in across my shoulder. Someone had pulled back the curtains. I was stiff and stupid from my cramped position. Despite the morning, the electric-lights were still burning in the room; I blinked down at myself and was astonished to find that I was in evening-dress. As I eased myself up, something dropped to the floor—the gold shoes of Fiesole.

From behind two warm arms fastened themselves about my neck, making me prisoner.

“You’re up early, Dante C. You’re a great, stupid juggins to sit up all night and spoil your temper, just when I want you to be more than ordinarily pleasant.”

“My temper’s not spoilt. Don’t worry.”

“I take your word for it. I’ve got a secret to tell you. I’m going on the spree to-day—going to be immensely happy. I want you to help. If you’ve any of your tiresome scruples left over, you’d best chuck ’em; or I’ll find someone else.”

“Bit early, isn’t it, to tackle a chap? I’m too stupid to know what you mean. But I’m game. How long’s this spree to last?”

“Till it ends.”

“Then it’ll last forever, so long as it’s just you and me.”

She dug the point of her chin into my shoulder. Glancing sideways, I caught the impish sparkle of her eyes and the glow of her cheeks, flushed with health and excitement.

“Perhaps you’d like to kiss me,” she whispered, bringing her demure red lips on a level with my mouth.

“And now, perhaps you’d like to kiss me,” I suggested.

When I attempted to rise, she restrained me. “Not till I’ve made my bargain and you’ve agreed to my terms. I haven’t made up my mind about you, so you needn’t start talking marriage. Don’t know what I’m going to do with you, Dannie. So you’re to come with me wherever I choose till I’m tired—and you’re to ask no questions. Understand?”

“You never will be tired. I’m coming with you always.”

“And you’ll ask no questions?”

“No more than I can help.”

She released me. I stood up and surveyed my crumpled shirt-front; I was so obviously a reveler who had outstayed discretion. She went off into peals of laughter, laughing all over, showing her small white teeth, and clapping her hands. “What have I done to you? You’re a bottle of champagne; I’ve pulled the cork out. I’ll never get you all back.”

I took her hands in mine, folding them together, and drew her to me. “You’ll never get any of me back. You’ve made me love you. That’s what you’ve done, you adorable witch-woman.”

“Oh, la, la! Don’t talk like that.”

“Can’t help it. Don’t want to help it. You’ve made me mad.”

“Poor old Dannie! Horrid of me, wasn’t it?”

A tap at the door; the maid entered, bringing in rolls and coffee. I started away from Fiesole, but she held me. “You can’t shock Marie; she’s hardened; she’s heard all about you, and some pretty bad things she’s heard.”

Over her coffee she grew thoughtful.

“What’s the matter?”

“You are.”

“Already?”

“How can I walk through Paris with a man in evening dress at ten in the morning?”

“How d’you want me dressed?”

“In something gay. Light tweeds, brown shoes, and a gray felt hat.”

“Got ’em all at my hotel. I’ll slip back.”

She slanted her eyes at me. “Slip back to London, perhaps! No, Dannie, I don’t trust you yet. I don’t intend to lose you.”

She rose from the table and vanished into her bedroom. Marie followed. Through the partly closed door the excited titter of their whispered conversation reached me, scraps of nervously spoken French, and the opening and shutting of drawers and cupboards.

When she re-appeared she was clad in a mole-colored suit of corduroy velvet, gathered in at the waist and close-fitting to her modish figure. The tube-skirt hung short to her ankles and was trimmed about with fur. The suède shoes, open-work stockings, and large muff were to match. Nestling close to her auburn hair was a huzzar cap of ermine. She halted in the sunlight, eyeing me with the naughty modesty of a coquette. She looked oddly young and distinguished on this rare spring morning. There never was such a woman for arranging her temperament to suit her dress. Her hectic manner of high spirits was abandoned; she seemed almost shy as she raised her muff to her lips and watched me, while I took in the effect.

“So I meet with your approval?”

Passing down the stairs, she hugged my arm impulsively—a trick which brought memories of Ruthita. “It’s awfully jolly to be loved—don’t you think so?”

Before the door a powerful two-seated car was standing. The chauffeur stepped out; Fiesole took his place at the wheel. As we drove down the boulevards she was recognized; people on the pavements paused to gaze back; men raised their hats and threw glances of inquiry at one another as to the identity of her strangely attired companion. We drew up at my hotel in the Rue St. Honoré.

“I give you fifteen minutes. Is that sufficient? Make yourself gay. Don’t forget, a tweed suit, brown shoes, a gray felt hat—oh, and a red tie if you’ve got one. I couldn’t endure anything black.”

I found her with her eager face turned towards the doorway, watching impatiently for me.

“A good beginning—ready to the second. Jump in. We’re off to somewhere where no one’ll know anything about us. Let’s see if we can’t lose ourselves.”

She swung the car round and away we snorted, through the Place de la Concorde blanched in sunlight, up the Champs Elysées where sunlight spattered against blossoming trees and lay in pools on the turf. The streets were animated with little children, women in bright dresses, dashing cars and carriages. Paris gleamed white and green and golden. Overhead the sky foamed and bubbled, yawning into blue and primrose gulleys, trampled by stampeding clouds.

At the Place de l’Etoile the car drew up sharply and skidded; circled like a hound picking up the scent; then darted swiftly away to the Bois, where fashionables already loitered and acacias trembled murmurously.

Fiesole was radiant with impatience. A goddess of speed, she bent above the wheel, casting her eyes along the road ahead. Did a gap occur in the traffic, she flung the car forward, driving recklessly, yet always with calculated precision. I marveled at her nerve and the silent power that lay hidden in her thin, fine hands.

As we shot the bridge at St. Cloud the pace quickened. It was as though she shook Paris from her skirts and ran panting to meet wider stretches of wind-bleached country. I had one vivid glimpse of the ribbon of blue river, boat-dotted, winding through young green of woodlands; then cities and sophistication, and all things save Fiesole, myself, and the future were at an end.

Soon the white road curved uninterrupted before us, a streak between pollarded trees and blown meadows. Over the horizon came bounding hills and church-spires, villages and rivers; as they came near to us they halted, like shy deer, for a second; when we drew level, they fled. It was as though we were stationary and the world was rushing past us.

The wind of our going brought color to her cheeks and fluttered out her hair. Her eyes were starry, fixed on the distance as she skirted the rim of eternity in her daring. Should an axle break or a tire burst, all this fire of youth would be extinguished forever. I glanced at the speedometer; it quivered from seventy to eighty, to eighty-five kilometers, and there it hovered.

The throb of the engine seemed the throb of my passion. We were traveling too fast for talking. She did not want to talk; she was escaping from something, memories, perhaps—hers and mine. In her modern way she was expressing what I had always felt: the tedium of captivity, sameness, and disappointment—the need for the unwalled garden, where barriers of obedience and duty are broken down.

At Evreux we halted for petrol. I proposed déjeuner, she shook her head naughtily.

“Where are we going?”

“Over there, to the West.”

“Any particular spot in the West?”

“You’ll see presently.”

“How about the theatre?”

“Time enough,” she said.

She spoke breathlessly, remaining at the wheel while the man was filling the tank. Somehow it seemed to me that the town had come between us; we understood one another better when the garden of the world was flying past us.

Before the man was paid, she had turned on the power. As we lunged forward, he jumped aside and I flung the money out. Our wild ride towards the Eden of the forbidden future recommenced.

Presently, without turning her head, she broke the silence. “Slip your arm round me, old boy; my back grows tired.”

I placed my arm about the slender, upright figure and slid my shoulder behind her, so she leant against me.

“What’s the idea, Fiesole? Paolo and Francesca?”

“And Adam and Eve, if you like; and Dan Leno and Herbert Campbell; and Joseph Parker and Jane Cake-bread. Anything, so long as we keep going.”

When I attempted to speak again, she turned on more power and threw me a smile which was a threat.

I clasped her closer. “Little devil! I’ll keep quiet. You needn’t do that.”

But though I kept quiet my heart beat madly. The panorama of change sweeping by, with her face the one thing constant, quickened and emphasized my need of her more than any spoken tenderness. Our thoughts merged and interchanged with a subtlety that speech could never have accomplished. The pressure of her body, the tantalizing joy of her nearness and forbiddenness, the imminence of death, the law of silence—these summed up in a moment’s experience the entire philosophy of love, and of life itself.

I began to understand her meaning, her language; she was temporizing as I had temporized at Venice; but instead of going away from me, she was fleeing with me from circumstance. She was telling me of her woman’s pride—her difficulty to make herself attainable after what had happened. She loved me and she hated me. She drew me to her and she thrust me from her. She could not forget and she dreaded to remember. And she said all this when, in escaping, she took me with her.

Now I saw nothing of the hurrying landscape; I watched her. I wrote all her beauty on the tablets of my mind—nothing should be unremembered: the way her curls crept from under her cap and fluttered about her temples; the clear pallor of her forehead; the firm, broad brows; the quiet challenge of her deep-lashed eyes; how her red mouth pouted and her head leant forward from her frail white neck, like a flower from its stalk, in a kind of listening expectancy. And I observed the tender swelling of her breasts, high and proud, yet humble for maternity; and the pliant strength of her supple body; and her long clean limbs; and the delicately modeled feet and ankles, which shot out from beneath her fur-trimmed skirt—the feet of a dancer, graceful and fragile as violins.

I was mad. I wanted her. No matter how she came to me, I wanted her. I could not bear the thought that we should ever be separated. She was so intensely mine at this present; and yet, though she was mine, I was insanely jealous to preserve her.

With the long fascination of watching her I bent slowly forward. The action was instinctive, uncalculated. How long I took in approaching her, I cannot tell. I was anxious to last out the joy of anticipation; I was not conscious of motion. My lips touched hers. Her hold on the wheel relaxed. Her eyes met mine. The car swerved, hung upon the edge of the road, ran along it balancing; then bounded back into the straight white line.

I was so frenzied that I did not care. She had thought to hold me prisoner by her speed; I would overcome her with defiance. I kissed her again, holding her to me. She kept her eyes on the distance now, but her mouth smiled tenderly.

“That was foolish,” she said.

I raised my voice to reach her above the moaning of the engine. “The whole thing’s foolish.”

She broke into wild laughter. “That’s why I like it, like you, like myself.”

We hovered on the brim of a valley; then commenced to sink as though the earth had given way beneath us. Far below, as far as eye could reach, were orchards smoking with white blossom. Through the heart of the valley a river ran; standing on its puny banks was a gray old town, blinking in the wind and sun like a spectacled grandmother who had nodded to sleep, and wakened bewildered to find spring rioting round her.

“Where is it?”

“Lisieux, unless I’m mistaken.”

“Then you know where we’re going?”

“More or less.”

We pulled up in a drowsy, sun-drenched market-place outside a sleepy café. At tables on the pavement, with hands in their blouses and legs sprawled out, sat a few artisans, eyeing their absinthe. Houses tottered and sagged from extreme old age. Across the way a cathedral, scarred by time and chapped by weather, raised its crumbling sculptured towers against the clouds.

She took my hand as she stepped out. “You nearly did for us just now.”

“Who cares?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “All Paris cares. I’m not anxious to be dead; when I am, I’d like to look pretty.”

When we had seated ourselves, she took out her mirror and commenced tidying her hair and brushing the dust from her brows. There was nothing to be had, the waiter informed us, but pot au feu; déjeuner was over. So I ordered pot au feu, red wine and an omelet.

As she replaced her mirror in her muff, she looked up brilliantly. “You know, I am pretty.”

She was being watched. The dull eyes of the absinthe-drinkers had become alert. Tradesmen had come out of their shops and stared at her across the square. Some of the bolder strolled into the café and seated themselves close to her. They were paying the unabashed homage that a Frenchman always pays to feminine beauty.

I lowered my voice to a whisper; my throat was parched with dust. “This can’t go on.”

She laughed with her eyes. “It can go on as long as there’s any petrol left, and as long as you don’t try to kiss me when I’m speeding.”

“That’s not what I meant; you know it.”

“What then? The same old thing—marriage?”

I ignored her flippancy. “You’ll be turning back directly, and when you get to Paris, you won’t be like you are now. You’ll be La Fiesole and to-night you’ll be dancing with them all watching. I can’t bear it.”

“I shan’t.”

I leant eagerly forward, but she drew away from me.

“You’re not going back? You’ve given up the theatre?”

She held me in suspense, letting her eyes wander as though she had not heard. Slowly she turned, with that lazy, taunting smile of hers. “Damn the theatre,” she said quietly; “I’m going on with you to the end.”

“And the end’s marriage?”

“Who can tell? Now don’t be a rotter. You’re spoiling everything. Let’s talk of something else.”

When we climbed into the car, “You drive,” she said.

“But to where?”

“That’s my secret. Straight on. I’ll tell you when to turn.”

We were hardly out of the valley before her eyes had closed and her head was nodding against my shoulder. I drove gently, fearing to disturb her. From time to time I looked down at the white slant of her throat, the shadows beneath her lashes, and the almost childish droop of her mouth. How the self she kept hidden revealed itself! Her face was that of a Madonna, for whom the cross was yet remote and the happiness near at hand—and both were certain. What different versions she gave me of herself! Once a sickening fear shook me like a leaf. I slowed the car to a halt, and listened for her breath. In that moment I suffered all the agony of loss that must some time accompany the actuality. One day, sooner or later, I told myself, this thing I had dreaded would occur. How much time was left to us to find life beautiful between then and now?

On the bare Normandy uplands, between tilled fields and driving clouds, I waited for her to waken. The air was growing chill; I drew my coat round her. I felt again, in a new and better way, that sense of nearness and forbiddenness which had exhilarated me to the point of delirium on the madcap journey down from Paris. I looked ahead into the pale distance, where the notched horizon bound the earth with a silver band ... and I wondered where ............