Beyond the Rocks

It was a year later before Theodora saw her family again. A very severe

attack of bronchitis, complicated by internal catarrh, prostrated Josiah

Brown in the first days of their marriage, and had turned her into a

superintendent nurse for the next three months; by that time a winter at

Hyères was recommended by the best physicians, and off they started.

Hyères, with a semi-invalid, a hospital nurse, and quantities of

medicine bottles and draught-protectors, is not the ideal place one

reads of in guide-books. Theodora grew to hate the sky and the blue

Mediterranean. She used to sit on her balcony at Costebelle and gaze at

the olive-trees, and the deep-green velvet patch of firs beyond, towards

the sea, and wonder at life.

She longed to go to the islands--anywhere beyond--and one day she read

Jean d'Agrève; and after that she wondered what Love was. It took a

mighty hold upon her imagination. It seemed to her it must mean Life.

It was the beginning of May before Josiah Brown thought of leaving for

Paris. England would be their destination, but the doctors assured him a

month of Paris would break the change of climate with more safety than

if they crossed the Channel at once.

Costebelle was a fairyland of roses as they drove to the station, and

peace had descended upon Theodora. She had fallen into her place, a

place occupied by many wives before her with irritable, hypochondriacal

husbands.

She had often been to Paris in her maiden days; she knew it from the

point of view of a cheap boarding-house and snatched meals. But the

unchecked gayety of the air and the façon had not been tarnished by

that. She had played in the Tuilleries Gardens and watched Ponchinello

at the Rond Point, and later been taken once or twice to dine at a cheap

café in the Bois by papa. And once she had gone to Robinson on a coach

with him and some aristocratic acquaintances of his, and eaten luncheon

up the tree, and that was a day of the gods and to be remembered.

But now they were going to an expensive, well-managed private hotel in

the Avenue du Bois, suitable to invalids, and it poured with rain as

they drove from the Gare de Lyon.

All this time something in Theodora was developing. Her beautiful face

had an air of dignity. The set of her little Greek head would have

driven a sculptor wild--and Josiah Brown was very generous in money

matters, and she had always known how to wear her clothes, so it was no

wonder people stopped and turned their heads when she passed.