That evening there came the beginning of the end.

The next day was to be Mid-Lent, and the entire city throbbed with preparation; the pagan city of Paris, which is ever eager to celebrate any sort of fÊte of any sort of faith. All the gay thousands that had not observed the fast panted for the feast, and that night, so von Klausen had promised his two American friends, the grand boulevard would be crowded from curb to curb and from the Porte St. Martin to the Madelaine.

"You must really see it," he said, for he had returned to the hotel with Muriel and had there met Stainton, who straightway invited him to luncheon in celebration of the concluding formalities of the sale. "The streets will be as deep as to the knee with confetti, and there will be masks. It is one of the annual things worth while."

He was eating a salad as unconcernedly as if his morning had been one of the dull routine of the Embassy.

Muriel looked at him in surprise at his ease of manner. For her own part, though she told herself religiously that she had done no wrong, she was singularly ill at ease. Her greeting, when Stainton had met and kissed her, was perfunctory, and, ever since, her bearing had been preoccupied. She gave but half an ear to her husband's long enthusiasm over the termination of his business with the syndicate, and now, as she glanced from von Klausen to Jim, she saw that the latter was tired.

"You look tired," she said. Another would have said that he looked old.

"Not at all," said Stainton. "I am feeling splendidly." His attention had been caught and his curiosity excited by von Klausen's description of the evening before the fÊte. If he felt somewhat worn from the now unaccustomed strain of business, he was all the more ready to welcome this chance for novel amusement.

"Good," he went on to the Austrian. "We shall see it. Won't you be our pilot, Captain?"

Von Klausen glanced at Muriel.

"If," he said, "you will do me the honour—you and Mrs. Stainton—to dine with me. We might early take a car across the river to the Foyot and then run back in plenty of time to make the promenade of the boulevards. That is to say," he added deferentially, but with no alteration of expression, "if Mrs. Stainton is not too weary because of her drive this morning?"

Jim, too, looked at Muriel.

"I am not tired," said she. Her tone was as conventional as the Austrian's.

Von Klausen turned to regard Stainton closely.

"But you, sir," he said, "are you sure that you are not tired? This juggle with fortunes is what you call heroic."

"Not at all, thanks. There was nothing but a great deal of talk and the signing of a few papers." Jim squared his broad shoulders, though the movement started a yawn that he was barely able to stifle. "Not at all." He began to resent this solicitude. "I am as fit as ever."

"Perhaps," persisted von Klausen, "should you take a brief rest during the remainder of the afternoon——"

"No, no." It was Muriel who interrupted. For a reason that she did not stop to analyse she was suddenly unwilling either to be left alone with her husband or to be deprived of his company. She did not yet wish to face Jim in their own rooms, and she did not wish to face her own thoughts. "No," she repeated, speaking rapidly and saying she scarcely knew what. "The day has begun so splendidly that it would be a shame to waste any of it by napping. I'm sure we should miss something glorious if we napped. I'm not a bit tired, and Jim is looking fresher every minute. You are sure you're not tired, aren't you, Jim?"

Von Klausen shrugged his shoulders.

"As Mrs. Stainton wishes," he said, "We might pass the afternoon by motoring to Versailles and back."

So they spent the afternoon in an automobile and came back to town in time for dinner at the famous restaurant close by the OdÉon and dined on croÛte consommÉ, filet of cod, and canard sauvage À la presse. After von Klausen had paid the bill, Stainton, who felt more tired than he had expected to feel, ordered another bottle of burgundy.

When they crossed the river by the Pont de la Concorde and turned from the rue Royale into the boulevards, the crowd that von Klausen had predicted, already possessed the broad streets. It surged from house-wall to house-wall; it shouted and danced and blew tin horns and threw confetti; it stopped the crawling taxicabs and was altogether as riotously happy as only a fÊte-day crowd in Paris can be.

Von Klausen and his party dismissed their motor at the corner of the rue Vignon and plunged afoot into the midst of the swaying mass of merrymakers. Amid shrill whistles, loud laughter, and showers of confetti that almost blinded them, they made their way nearly to the rue Scribe. Then, suddenly, Muriel and von Klausen realised that Stainton was lost.

They called, but their voices merged in the general clatter. They stood on tiptoe and strained their eyes. They thought now that they saw him on this side, and again they saw him on that; but, though they shouldered their way, the Austrian vigorously making a path, hither and yon, and though they knew that somewhere, probably only a few yards away, Stainton was making corresponding efforts to discover their whereabouts, he eluded them as if he had been a will-o'-the-wisp.

Tired at last by the long day and its emotions, jostled by the fÊte-makers, and frightened by the disappearance of her husband, Muriel began quietly to cry. The Austrian at once noticed.

"Do not alarm yourself, dear lady," he said—and, as he had to bend to her to get the words to her ear among the tumult, his cheek brushed a loose strand of her dark hair—"pray do not alarm yourself. We shall find him soon, or he will await us when we return to your hotel."

"We can never find him here!" Muriel declared. She had been obliged, in order not to lose her fellow-searcher, to cling to his arm, and her fingers fastened as convulsively about it as the hands of a drowning man grasp the floating log for rescue. "He'll know that, and I'm sure he'll go at once to the hotel. Let's go there ourselves—at once—at once! Call a cab."

Not a cab, however, was in sight, and this von Klausen explained to her, bending to her ear.

"We must walk," he said. "It is not so far—if you are not too tired?"

"No, no, I'm not too tired—or I won't be if we can only hurry."

They started slowly, by necessity, on their way.

"But I am sorry," said von Klausen, "that you are afraid. You are afraid—of me?"

His tone was hurt. She looked up at him impulsively and saw genuine sorrow in his bright eyes. They were very young eyes.

"Oh, no," she said, "not of you. I know you wouldn't——"

"Yet," he interrupted, "you were a little afraid of me, I think, this morning."

"Not afraid—even then. And now—well, I remember the talk we had afterward. I hope you haven't forgotten it."

Again his lips were near her neck.

"I shall never forget it," he vowed.

Something in his voice made her sure that he had not interpreted her words as she had intended them to be interpreted. Nevertheless, she dared not resume a subject that could be safe only while it was closed. She said no more, and von Klausen was almost equally silent until they had reached the hotel.

"Has Mr. Stainton returned?" asked Muriel of the first servant that they met.

The servant thought not.

"Ask at the bureau."

Stainton had not yet come back.

"He will certainly follow us very shortly," said von Klausen. "It may be better that we await him in your sitting-room."

Muriel had been expecting either that Stainton would have reached the hotel before them or that her companion would leave her at the door. Now a new difficulty presented itself. It is one of the curses of our minor errors—perhaps the greatest—that they inspire us with the fear that the persons about us may be suspecting us of worse offences. Muriel had never before considered what the people of the hotel might think of her. She was conscious, moreover, of having done nothing further than withhold from her husband the narrative of what most women of the world would consider nothing more than an amusing flirtation; yet now, with the remembrance of that scene in the Bois vividly in her mind, she became immediately certain that the servants regarded with lifted eyebrows this wife who had returned without her husband at an hour not precisely early? To dismiss von Klausen in the hallway would, her method of logic twisted for her, confirm any suspicions that might have been roused.

"Yes," she agreed quietly, "we'll go upstairs." She turned to the servant at the door. "When my husband comes in," she told him, "you will say that Captain von Klausen and I are awaiting him in my—in the sitting-room of the suite that my husband and I occupy."

For a reason that neither could have explained they did not speak on their way to the room, and, after they had entered it, von Klausen shutting the door behind them and switching on the electric light, this silence continued until it became almost committal. Muriel laid off her wraps and sank into a wide chair at some distance from the window. It was she that was first to speak. She spoke, however, with an effort, and she sought refuge in platitude.

"I am tired," she said; and then, as von Klausen did not reply, she added: "Yes, after all, I find that I am very tired."

"It has been," said the Austrian, "a difficult day for you."

There was again silence. He stood before her, slim, erect, more boyish than ever, his face, none the less, rather pale and set, and his eyes narrowed.

"I wonder what can have happened to Jim," she at last managed to say.

"Only what has happened to us. He—I think he will be here soon."

Von Klausen was looking at her. She wished that he would not do that. She wished that there would be an end to these interruptions of silence. She wished devoutly that Jim would return.

"It—it is rather close here," she said.

"Do you think it close?" he responded. He did not take his narrowed eyes from her. He did not move.

"Yes," she answered. "Will you—will you be so good as to open the window?"

He bowed as gravely as if she had required of him a mighty sacrifice, and he turned to the window.

The long velvet curtains were pulled together, and he did not attempt to draw them from the glass. Instead, he simply slipped his arm between them. Then something went wrong with the knob that controls the bolt. He shook the knob. His hand slipped and went through the pane. There was a tinkle of falling glass.

Startled by the sound Muriel rose quickly to her feet.

"What is it?" she asked.

She took an involuntary step forward. Then she saw that von Klausen was trying to conceal from her his right hand, red with blood.

"You are hurt?" she cried.

Her swarthy cheek whitened. There was a swift catch in her throat.

"It is nothing," he answered. "The window is open."

The window was indeed open. The curtain, however, remained drawn.

"But you are hurt!" repeated Muriel.

She put out her hand and seized his own with a slight gash across the knuckles—a gash from which a little of the blood flowed over her white fingers and marked them with a bright stain.

That handclasp finished what the spring sunshine of the morning had begun. She stood there, swaying a little, her lithe body still immature; the electric light from overhead falling directly upon her blue-black hair and level brows; her damp red lips parted; her face white, but warm and dusky, and her great dark eyes wide, half-terrified, seeing things they had never seen before.

Von Klausen's boyish face glowed. His blue gaze sparkled as if with electric fire. His wounded hand closed about her fingers.

The circuit was complete.

"I love you!" he whispered, and he took her in his arms.

From somewhere, somewhere that seemed far, far away, Muriel heard a voice that answered him and knew that it was her own voice:

"I love you!"

She clung to him; she held him fast. She knew. It was a knowledge beyond reason. There was no need to reason why these things should be so, when they were. She was aware only that in the kisses falling upon her lips, in the hands holding her tight, in the heart pounding against her breast there was a power that she missed in Stainton: a power that answered to the force in her own true being.

"But—but it can't be! It can't be!" she sobbed.

Von Klausen kissed her again: the long, long kiss of youth and love.

"But Jim——You don't know him. I can't hurt him. He is too good. He is far, far too good for either of us."

Von Klausen's reply was another kiss, but this time a light, an almost merry kiss.

"He need never know," said the Austrian.

She leaped from his arms. She sprang a yard away. Her face went rigid.

"You—you——" she said. "What do you mean? I tell you that I could never ask Jim to divorce me, and you say that he needn't know!"

It was the Austrian who was amazed now. He was frankly at sea.

"Divorce?" he echoed. "Who spoke of divorce?"

"Go!"

Muriel's face was crimson. She drew herself to her full height. She pointed to the door. Her finger shook with anger; her eyes shone with hate and shame.

"Go!"

"But what does this mean? I love you. You love me. Yet you tell me go."

"Love?" The word seemed to sicken her. "Love? You don't know what the word means. You don't know! You don't know!" She passed her hand across her face. "Oh, leave here!" she cried. "Leave here at once!"

"But, Muriel——"

"Go!" She moved to the call-button in the wall. "At once, or I'll ring for the servants."

"Muriel——"

"Don't speak! Don't dare to say another word to me! If you speak again, I'll ring."

He raised his arms once more and looked at her. What he observed gave him no explanation and no comfort. His arms fell to his slim sides. He shrugged his shoulders, picked up his hat and coat, and left the room.

Drawing back from his passing figure as if his touch were contamination, Muriel waited until he had gone. She closed the door behind him; tried to bolt it; remembered that it secured itself by a spring lock which only a key could open from the hall; then, almost in a faint, fell into the wide arm-chair where she had sat when she sent von Klausen to the window.

Stainton opened the door fifteen minutes later. He was fatigued from his day and haggard from his solitary confetti-beaten walk along the boulevards. He saw her nearly recumbent before him, limp and pale.

"Muriel!" he cried.

She opened her heavy eyes.

"Jim!"

He hurried to her, knelt beside her. He stroked her hair as a father strokes the hair of his weary child.

"My poor little girl!" he said.

Had she thought at all coherently about his coming, she had not meant to suffer his caresses until she had told him something of what had occurred. But, before she found time to begin a narrative of the truth, or the half truth, he began to pet her. She could not confess to him while he did that.

"I thought you were lost," she said. "We looked, but couldn't find you anywhere. I thought you might have been run over. I thought—I hardly know what I thought."

"My dear little girl!" he murmured. He patted her left hand. He reached for its fellow. "Why," he cried, "you've hurt yourself!"

Muriel started.

"No, no!" she said. "It's nothing. Truly, it's nothing. It's——" She laughed shrilly. "I asked Captain von Klausen to open the window. It stuck—the window, I mean. He put his hand through the glass and cut his wrist. I bandaged it. I scratched myself when I picked up some of the pieces from the floor."

She realised that she had gone too far to retreat. She had lied again to her husband, and for no adequate reason. She had crossed the Rubicon of marital ethics.

After that she was committed to silence. Every endeavour she made to draw back involved her in a new ambush, brought her to a new maze of deception. Truth became impossible.

She wanted to tell the truth. The more impossible it became, the more bitterly she wanted to tell it. She hated von Klausen. She was sure that she had never loved her husband as she loved him now. The fact that her relations with the Austrian had begun and ended with a mere declaration of love did not, in her eyes, lessen the sin; the fact that von Klausen had misunderstood her attitude and had himself assumed an attitude far below that which she had at first expected, increased her antipathy against her lover and heightened her affection—call it love as she would, it would now be no more than affection—for Jim. She wanted to tell him, but every lapsing moment laid a new stone upon the wall that barred her way.

She sat down in a chair before him and put her face in her hands.

"Jim," she said in a low voice, "I am not going to have a baby."

At first he did not understand her. He thought that the sight of blood had shaken her nerves and that she was recurring to the distaste for motherhood that she had expressed to him in Aiken.

"Don't worry, dearie," he said. "It can't be helped now, but there is really no reason for you to worry."

She did not look up, but she shook her head.

"I am not," she repeated.

He came to her, stood before her, and patted a little patch of her cheek, which her hands left bare.

"There, there," he said.

At his touch she broke into convulsive sobbing.

"You don't understand me," she sobbed. "It is over. It is all over."

He withdrew his hand quickly; he caught his breath.

"What—what——" he stammered.

"O, Jim!" she cried.

"Muriel," he besought her, "tell me. What—how? When? You don't mean——"

"Yes, yes," she moaned, her hands still tight before her face.

Stainton stood erect. He clenched his fists in an effort to control himself. He pleaded to his ears that they had not heard correctly; his reason declared that, if his ears had heard aright, this was the fancy of an ailing woman; but his frame trembled, and his voice shook as he began again:

"You don't mean——"

"I do, I do. Oh, let me alone! Don't ask me any more!"

He had built for years upon his desire for physical immortality. Now the edifice that he had reared was shattered, and Stainton shook with its fall. He clutched the back of a frail chair that stood opposite Muriel's. Perceptibly he swayed.

"When?" he whispered out of dry lips. His mouth worked; his iron-grey brows fought their way to a meeting. "When?"

Her head sank lower in her hands.

"While you were at Lyons," she said. "The very day you left."

"Is that why you didn't go to the Boussingaults'?"

"I suppose so."

"You suppose?" Almost anger shot from his eyes. "Don't you know? You must know! How did this happen?"

Muriel's head nearly rested on her knees; her shoulders twitched. Her only reply was an inarticulate noise that seemed to tear itself from her breast.

"Answer me!" he demanded.

She rose and stumbled a few steps toward him. She held out her arms. Her face was like a sheet, and her eyes and mouth were like holes burnt into a sheet.

"I fell," she mumbled, and her words seemed to strike him. "I went for a drive. Coming back—here at the hotel—I fell from the cab—getting out. I got up to the bedroom. And it happened. I sent for a doctor—not Boussingault. He treated me, and I paid him. The nurse, too. They said it was easy—They said I would be all right in a week.—I thought I was—But I have suffered—O, Jim, Jim! Don't look like that! Don't, please, think——"

She crashed to the floor at his feet.

Then Stainton realised something of the bodily agony that had been hers while he was absent and of the mental agony that had driven her on their mad dash through Switzerland to Austria and Italy, the mental agony that lashed her now. He put aside, for the moment, his own suffering. He stooped and took her up and held her in his arms and, pressing her head against his breast and holding her sobbing body tight to his, tried to murmur broken, unthought words of comfort.

Gradually, very gradually, she grew a little quieter.

"My dear, my dear," he said in a voice so hoarse that he scarcely knew it for his own, "why did you keep torturing yourself? You should have had rest, and instead——Why didn't you tell me? Why?"

"I was afraid," she said, simply.

"Dearie!" he cried. "Of me?"

Her words were a fresh stab.

"Yes. I knew how much you wanted——And I was afraid."

"You needn't have been. You see it now. You needn't have been. Tell me what I can do for you, dear. Only tell me."

"Take me away from Paris!" sobbed Muriel. "I have come to hate the place. I can't stand it another day. I can't stand it. Some other time, perhaps——Only now—oh, take me away!"

"We'll go home, Muriel," he said. "We'll sail by the first boat. Back to our own country. Back home."

But at that she shuddered.

"That would be worse," she said, rapidly. "It would be worse even than Paris. Don't you see? We left there happy, expecting——Not there. No, I couldn't bear that."

Stainton had put her on a chair and was kneeling beside her, stroking her hair and wrists. His fingers touched the dried blood on her hand, brown and horrible. But he kissed the blood.

She drew the hand from him.

"Your poor little hand!" said Jim. "Let me see the cut."

"It is—there is nothing to be seen. It was only a scratch. Let's talk about getting away."

"I thought," said Stainton, "that you wanted to come back here when we were in Italy."

"I did," she faltered. "It seemed there that it would be easier to tell you here, where it happened. But to-night scared me."

"To-night? Why to-night, dearest? Not what has just happened? Not anything I have said about it?"

"Not that. I don't know. Something before that——"

"Because you lost me in the crowd?"

"Yes, yes: because I lost you. Because I lost you for that hour on the boulevards. I don't like Paris any more. I'm afraid of Paris. I—I don't like the confetti. Let's go away, Jim. Please."

He wished that she would go back to New York. He argued for them both that the return would be wise. When something terrible has occurred in unfamiliar surroundings, if one reverts to surroundings that are familiar, it is often possible to forget the terror, or, if it must be remembered, to remember it with pangs that are less acute than those which one suffers on the scene of the occurrence.

New York, however, she would not hear of. Not yet, she said. They would do better, now, to go to some place that would be different from Paris and different from New York.

"We'll go to Marseilles," she said.

She spoke without much consideration. The name of Marseilles happened to be lying at the top of the names of cities in the back of her mind. It was merely readiest to hand. She did not care. She cared only that her effort to tell the truth had ended in more falsehood.

The next morning they left for Marseilles.