Three Weeks | Page 3

habits
his lady wife had never been able to break him of. So the affair grew
and grew! Until towards the middle of April Paul was advised to travel
for his health.
"Your father and I can sanction no engagement, Paul, before you
return," said Lady Henrietta. "If, in July, on your twenty-third birthday,
you still wish to break your mother's heart--I suppose you must do so.
But I ask of you the unfettered reflection of three months first."
This seemed reasonable enough, and Paul consented to start upon a tour
round Europe--not having spoken the final fatal and binding words to
Isabella Waring. They made their adieux in the pouring rain under a
dripping oak in the lane by the Vicarage gate.
Paul was six foot two, and Isabella quite six foot, and broad in
proportion. They were dressed almost alike, and at a little distance, but
for the lady's scanty petticoat, it would have been difficult to

distinguish her sex.
"Good-bye, old chap," she said, "We have been real pals, and I'll not
forget you!"
But Paul, who was feeling sentimental, put it differently.
"Good-bye, darling," he whispered with a suspicion of tremble in his
charming voice. "I shall never love any woman but you--never, never
in my life."
Cuckoo! screamed the bird in the tree.
And now we are getting nearer the episode. Paris bored Paul--he did
not know its joys and was in no mood to learn them. He mooned about
and went to the races. His French was too indifferent to make theatres a
pleasure, and the attractive ladies who smiled at his blue eyes were for
him défendues. A man so recently parted from the only woman he
could ever love had no right to look at such things, he thought. How
young and chivalrous and honest he was--poor Paul!
So he took to visiting Versailles and Fontainebleau and Compiègne
with a guide-book, and came to the conclusion it was all "beastly rot."
So he turned his back upon France and fled to Switzerland.
Do you know Switzerland?--you who read. Do you know it at the
beginning of May? A feast of blue lakes, and snow-peaks, and the
divinest green of young beeches, and the sombre shadow of dark firs,
and the exhilaration of the air.
If you do, I need not tell you about it. Only in any case now, you must
see it through the eyes of Paul. That is if you intend to read another
page of this bad book.
It was pouring with rain when he drove from the station to the hotel.
His temper was at its worst. Pilatus hid his head in mist, the
Bürgenstock was invisible--it was chilly, too, and the fire smoked in

the sitting-room when Paul had it lighted.
His heart yearned for his own snug room at Verdayne Place, and the
jolly voice of Isabella Waring counting point, quint and quatorze. What
nonsense to send him abroad. As if such treatment could be effectual as
a cure for a love like his. He almost laughed at his mother's folly. How
he longed to sit down and write to his darling. Write and tell how he
hated it all, and was only getting through the time until he saw her six
feet of buxom charms again--only Paul did not put it like that--indeed,
he never thought about her charms at all--or want of them. He analysed
nothing. He was sound asleep, you see, to nuances as yet; he was just a
splendid English young animal of the best class.
He had promised not to write to Isabella--or, if he must, at least not to
write a love-letter.
"Dear boy," the Lady Henrietta had said when giving him her fond
parting kiss, "if you are very unhappy and feel you greatly wish to write
to Miss Waring, I suppose you must do so, but let your letter be about
the scenery and the impressions of travel, in no way to be interpreted
into a declaration of affection or a promise of future union--I have your
word, Paul, for that?"
And Paul had given his word.
"All right, mother--I promise--for three months."
And now on this wet evening the "must" had come, so he pulled out
some hotel paper and began.
"MY DEAR ISABELLA:
"I say--you know--I hate beginning like this--I have arrived at this
beastly place, and I am awfully unhappy. I think it would have been
better if I had brought Pike with me, only those rotten laws about
getting the little chap back to England would have been hard. How is
Moonlighter? And have they really looked after that strain, do you
gather? Make Tremlett come down and report progress to you daily--I

told him to. My rooms look out on a beastly lake, and there are