it's a wonderful thing; quite awesome. Perhaps she expects you to
become deep and mystic," said Gregory. "Please don't."

"There is no danger of that," said Karen. "Of course it is the beauty of
it and the strangeness, that made Tante care for it. It is the sort of
thing she would love to have herself."

"Where on earth is he to go?" Gregory surmised. "Yes, he might look well
in that big music-room at Les Solitudes, or in some vast hall where he
would be more of an episode and less of a white elephant. I hardly thing
he'll fit anywhere into the passage," he ventured.

Karen had been looking from him to the Bouddha. "But Gregory, of course
he must stay here," she said, "in the room we live in. Tante, I am sure,
meant that." Her voice had a tremor. "I am sure it would hurt her
dreadfully if we put him out of the way."

Barker was now gone and Gregory put his arm around her. "But it makes
all the room wrong, doesn't it? It will make us all wrong--that's what I
rather feel. We aren't _a la hauteur_." He remembered, after speaking
them, that these were the words he had used of his one colloquy with
Madame von Marwitz.

"I don't think," said Karen after a moment, "that you are quite kind."

"Darling--I'm only teasing you," said Gregory. "I'll like the thing if
you want me to, and make offerings to him every morning--he looks in
need of sacrifices and offerings, doesn't he? And what a queer Oriental
scent is in the air. Rather nice, that."

"Please don't call it the 'thing,'" said Karen. He saw into her divided
loyalty. And his comfort was to know that she didn't like the Bouddha
either.

"I won't," he promised. "It isn't a thing, but a duty, a privilege, a
responsibility. He shall stay here, where he is. He really won't crowd
us too impossibly, and that sofa can go."

"You see," said Karen, and tears now came to her eyes, "it would hurt
her so dreadfully if she could dream that we did not love it very, very
much."

"I know," said Gregory, kissing her. "I perfectly understand. We will
love it very, very much. Come now, you must be hungry; let us have our
tea."

CHAPTER XVII

Madame von Marwitz sat in the deep chintz sofa with Karen beside her,
and while she talked to the young couple, Karen's hand in hers, her eyes
continually went about the room with an expression that did not seem to
match her alert, if rather mechanical, conversation. Karen had already
seen her, the day before, when she had gone to th