Produced by Suzanne Shell, Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) NOTWITHSTANDING By MARY CHOLMONDELEY AUTHOR OF "RED POTTAGE" Und was Ist Zufall anders, als der rohe Stein, Der Leben annimmt unter Bildners Hand? LONDON: JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 1913 _First Edition October 1913_ _Reprinted October 1913_ _All rights reserved_ TO MAY AND JEANNIE NOTWITHSTANDING CHAPTER I "Le vent qui vient à travers la montagne M'a rendu fou!" VICTOR HUGO. Annette leaned against the low parapet and looked steadfastly at the water, so steadfastly that all the brilliant, newly-washed, tree-besprinkled city of Paris, lying spread before her, cleft by the wide river with its many bridges, was invisible to her. She saw nothing but the Seine, so tranquil yesterday, and to-day chafing beneath its bridges and licking ominously round their great stone supports--because there had been rain the day before. The Seine was the only angry, sinister element in the suave September sunshine, and perhaps that was why Annette's eyes had been first drawn to it. She also was angry, with the deep, still anger which invades once or twice in a lifetime placid, gentle-tempered people. Her dark eyes under their long curled lashes looked down over the stone bastion of the Pont Neuf at a yellow eddy just below her. They were beautiful eyes, limpid, deep, with a certain tranquil mystery in them. But there was no mystery in them at this moment. They were fixed, dilated, desperate. Annette was twenty-one, but she looked much younger, owing to a certain slowness of development, an immaturity of mind and body. She reminded one not of an opening flower, but of a big, loose-limbed colt, ungainly still, but every line promising symmetry and grace to come. She was not quite beautiful yet, but that clearly was also still to come, when life should have had time to erase a certain ruminative stolidity from her fine, still countenance. One felt that in her schoolroom days she must have been often tartly desired not to "moon." She gave the impression of not having wholly emerged from the chrysalis, and her bewildered face, the face of a dreamer, wore a strained expression, as if some cruel hand had mockingly rent asunder the veils behind which her life had been moving and growing so far, and had thrust her, cold and shuddering, with unready wings, into a world for which she was not fully equipped. And Annette, pale gentle Annette, standing on the threshold of life, unconsciously clutching an umbrella and a little handbag, was actually thinking of throwing herself into the water!