Page:Keeping the Peace.pdf/206

 young man who so obviously preferred art to herself. And Edward perhaps, so filled with new contacts and enthusiasms, had begun to lose interest in her. Either he had really begun to lose interest or else resentment at the changed tone and diminished frequency of her letters had numbed his feelings for her. There was nothing in her later letters upon which he could have put his finger and said, "But I'm not" or "But I haven't," but nevertheless they had a quality which always made him feel as if he were being found fault with and put upon the defensive. Sometimes he wondered if he had written too frankly about the St. André murals and the nude models. But it couldn't be that. Alice wasn't a fool.

In the Beaulieus' little hunting-lodge he had a stone room in a gable. It had an arched ceiling, a hooded fireplace, leaded windows and walls four feet thick. The door was of oak, bound with highly wrought iron. When the bolt was shot it would have taken artillery to batter it down. His chief window looked out over the ornamental water and at the groups of limes beyond. In the morning sparrows, some of which quarreled and some of which made love, gathered in the ivy outside this window and wakened him. Very soon after the sparrows wakened him there would come an ancient Breton woman wearing upon her head