l
dinner-party that night; most of the family were there and they had
music after it, Constance singing very prettily--she was taking
lessons--the last two songs she had learned, one by Widor and one by
Tosti.

Yet as he drove home late Gregory was aware that Constance still
remained a pleasant possibility to contemplate and that he had come no
nearer to being in love with her. It might be easier, he mused, if only
she could offer some trivial trick or imperfection, if she had been
freckled, say, or had had a stammer, or prominent teeth. He could
imagine being married to her so much more easily than being in love with
her, and he was a little vexed with himself for his own
insusceptibility.

Constance was the last thing that he thought of before going to sleep;
yet it was not of her he dreamed. He dreamed, very strangely, of the
little cosmopolitan waif whom he had met that afternoon. He was walking
down a road in a forest. The sky above was blue, with white clouds
heaving above the dark tree-tops, and it was a still, clear day. His
mood was the boyish mood of romance and expectancy, touched with a
little fear. At a turning of the road he came suddenly upon Karen
Woodruff. She was standing at the edge of the forest as if waiting for
him, and she held a basket of berries, not wild-strawberry and not
bramble, but a fairy-tale fruit that a Hans Andersen heroine might have
gathered, and she looked like such a heroine herself, young, and
strange, and kind, and wearing the funny little dress of the concert,
the white dress with the flat blue bows. She held out the basket to him
as he approached, and, smiling at each other in silence, they ate the
fruit with its wild, sweet savour. Then, as if he had spoken and she
were answering him, she said: "And I love you."

Gregory woke with this. He lay for some moments still half dreaming,
with no surprise, conscious only of a peaceful wonder. He had forgotten
the dream in the morning; but it returned to him later in the day, and
often afterwards. It persisted in his memory like a cluster of
unforgettable sensations. The taste of the berries, the scent of the
pine-trees, the sweetness of the girl's smile, these things, rather than
any significance that they embodied, remained with him like one of the
deep impressions of his boyhood.

CHAPTER VI

On the morning that Gregory Jardine had waked from his dream, Madame von
Marwitz sat at her writing-table tearing open, with an