The Colonel’s capacity for the holding of liquid substances looked abnormal even to a man of Paul’s experience.

‘Thirst is now assuaged,’ he said solemnly at the end of his third deep tumbler, ‘and a man may begin to enjoy himself. There ought to be a boy here who can make a cocktail.’

He kept the boy fairly busy, and he talked. He had recovered himself curiously, and there was now no more than a hint of coming intoxication in his eye and in his voice. It seemed as if he had arrived at a settled stage, and was able to make a longish stay there.

‘You’re pretty thick with our little friend, ain’t you?’ he asked, rolling round in his seat.

‘If you are speaking of the lady who left us a little while ago——’

‘Why, certainly,’ said the Colonel.

‘I have the honour of her friendship,’ said Paul with an icy air.

The Colonel was no longer smoking, but he chewed the end of his cigar with a lazy appetite, and he smiled.

‘Funny little devil she is,’ he said contemplatively. ‘Women are odd, however you take ‘em; but she’s odder than odd. By God, sir, she’s odder than Dick’s hat-band! I suppose she wants me to believe that she’s forgotten how I bowled her out years ago. Soul! Heart ‘It was before she got married. She made me believe that I was the only man she ever came across who had either. There were twenty-three of us met in New York City, and we had a dinner on the strength of it. I was that mad, sir, at the time, I drummed up the whole contingent. I believe that evening left some of us a little sore, but it cured us, and little Gertie had three-and-twenty play-fellows the fewer next morning. And I’m damned if she didn’t open fire on me again in the first half-hour after all these years. It’s funny, ain’t it?’

‘I am afraid I must bid you good-afternoon, sir,’ said Paul. ‘And if you will permit a stranger to intrude in your affairs, I would suggest that you should make that cocktail your last.’

‘Wha-at?’ asked the Colonel, placidly smiling, and eating his cigar. ‘Should we have made it four-and-twenty if you had been in Noo Yawk City at the time of that banquet.’

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ Paul answered stiffly. ‘I don’t care to continue this conversation, and I will take the liberty to end it.’

‘I say,’ said the Colonel, ‘wait there. I never began a quarrel in my life, Mr. Armstrong, but I have ended—lemme see——’ He began to count upon his fingers with an inward look. ‘I have ended eight,’ he said.

‘Do you wish to quarrel now?’ Paul demanded.

‘Why, no, sir, no,’ said the Colonel; ‘I am a man of peace. But when you presoom, sir, to dictate what a man shall drink, and when you presoom to object to the theme upon which he chooses to converse—why, don’t you see?’

‘No,’ said Paul, ‘I do not see. If you choose to renew this conversation to-morrow, that is my hotel, and I shall be pleased to meet you there at any hour before noon.’

‘Now,’ the Colonel answered, taking him by the sleeve in alcoholic friendship, ‘you are becoming shirty, and your tone is warlike. And that, Mr. Armstrong, is unreasonable. Perhaps you know now that I am an old traveller. I’m a little bit of an explorer, sir, and I have never objected to being guided over a bit of country that I didn’t know, if I happened to meet a man that knew it Now, that’s enough said, Mr. Armstrong. If you find my conversation distasteful, just damn my eyes and go. But don’t you let me hear you. You can curse outside to your heart’s content, and, you see, that needn’t breed a quarrel.’

‘Very well,’ said Paul. The Solemn drunken man made him laugh in spite of his own anger and bewildered misery of mind. ‘Whatever cursing I may have to do shall be done outside.’

‘Good,’ the Colonel answered, and having by this time eaten his cigar to its burned ash, he ejected the remnant and permitted Paul to escape.

As he came out upon the mild widespread sunshine of the street at the close of the afternoon, he seemed to realize himself for the first time in his whole life. He did not trouble himself to curse the Colonel, but he cursed Paul Armstrong soundly, and, striding rapidly towards his hotel, resolved on instant action. He mounted to his own room, and there he wrote a letter.

‘I must see you,’ it ran, ‘and I must see you to-day. I must catch to-morrow’s train for London, and I cannot guess when I may be able to return. I have neglected both work and business too long, and I must shake myself awake. On the whole, perhaps the kindest and best thing you could do for me would be to send me away for good and all. I have lived in a fool’s dream too long.’

There was much more, but this was the gist of it, and the writer sealed and despatched it, not daring to tempt himself to a new effort by reading it over. The answer reached him in an hour:

‘What is it, my poor friend, which has so disturbed you as to prompt you to the writing of such a letter as I have just received? I had thought myself safe in counting upon your esteem. If you are really called to London by affairs of urgency, I must not keep you, and, of course, I should be hurt if you went without telling me good-bye. It happens that I have engaged to dine at table-d’hÔte tonight with passing friends, but I shall be free at ten o’clock. Ask for me then.’

Paul had been conscious and jealous of a good many small rivalries since he and the Baroness had first set up that platonic communion of soul in which they had now lived so long, but on the whole he had to confess that Gertrude had acted with complete discretion in these matters, and he had been repeatedly forced to admit to himself that he had been unable to find any real ground for his tremors. He had never once felt himself in actual danger of being deposed from his position of high priest in that ridiculous temple. When a man is in love with a woman, he cannot be expected to judge her actions or her meaning wisely, and the Baroness’s platonics, with the little flashes of earthly fire in amongst them here and there, had always seemed to him to indicate a nature throbbing with fervour which was held in restraint only by a delicacy of equal charm and beauty, and a lofty moral sense. But he was easily open to the influence of other men’s opinions, and he had never been able to think of Ralston’s smile without an inward twinge which had sometimes amounted to an actual tenor. Suppose he were merely being played with by a heartless woman, who found it minister to her vanity to have him perpetually dangling at her heels in public and burning incense in private before her day by day? Suppose he were throwing away the best and freshest years of his manhood in the pursuit of such a mocking shadow? These, of course, were a sort of lover’s blasphemies against his idol, and he resented them with all his heart and soul, exactly as any other worshipper would resent the insinuations of the devil against the powers and perfections of his deity. His resentment could not lead him to oblivion, and his memory of Ralston’s humorous and mischievous enjoyment was with him often. And now came this American man, this boozing Colonel, with none of Ralston’s reticence, and apparently with none of his respect for the character of a lady whom he had known long and well, and the coarser accusation travelled on the same lines as the other, and only differed from it in going a good deal further.

‘I will know to-night,’ Paul said to himself savagely a hundred times in the course of that afternoon and evening, and when at length the slow hours had rolled themselves on to the time of his appointment, he presented himself in the vestibule of the Baroness’s hotel in a condition of tragic resolve.

Gertrude was there in the very act of saying farewell to her passagÈre American friends, and he thought to himself, with as much of anger as admiration, that he had never seen her look altogether so charming as she did at that instant. The vivacity of colouring which commonly distinguished her was softened, and the unaccustomed pallor of her face lent a tender softness to her whole aspect. Her eyes, too, had lost something of their brilliance, and seemed faintly humid. He could have sworn that she had been crying, but when she turned to meet him after the departure of her friends, there was a gentle sparkle of welcome in her face, and she held out her beautiful jewelled little hand with a charming frankness.

‘I am so glad you are here,’ she said, ‘and I was so much afraid that those dear tiresome people were going to overstay their time, and that I should have to keep you waiting.’

She had a hooded opera-cloak thrown over her left arm, and she held this out to him, and turned away so that he might adjust it about her shoulders.

‘It is a lovely night,’ she said, ‘like a night in our Indian summer in dear old Massachusetts. Let us talk in the garden, Paul.’

He walked by her side, still half saturnine, but in part conquered already by the soft seduction of her voice and face. He did not speak a word until they reached the garden terrace, and then only in answer to her question:

‘You must really go, Paul?’

‘Yes,’ he answered gloomily, ‘I must really go.’

For the season of the year it was a wonderful night even for Naples. The air was like balm, and was loaded with the scent of flowers. Lights twinkled here and there about the garden, and the moon shone broad and bright almost at the zenith, half drowning the lustre of the stars in the haze of light it spread. Scattered about the gardens were a dozen parties, more or less, all chattering gaily, and here and there disposed to frolic Their presence jarred on Paul, but there was no removing it He allowed Gertrude to lead the way, and she; strolling in pensive silence, brought him to a shaded avenue on the western side of the garden, where a gentleman and lady were promenading slowly arm-in-arm away from them. Gertrude laid a hand upon his arm, and stood still until the couple in front had strayed out of hearing, and then resumed her pensive march.

‘How came you, Paul,’ she asked, looking suddenly up to him, ‘to write so strange a letter?’

‘I had to write it,’ Paul answered in a constricted voice, in which a certain note of anger sounded. It disturbed him to find that his resolve was melting away from him, and he felt that he must needs harden his heart if be were but partly to fulfil his purpose. ‘What is there in the letter,’ he asked therefore, ‘which you find strange?

‘You have never told me,’ she responded, ‘one word of your purpose until this afternoon, and you are leaving me tomorrow. Is not that a little strange, Paul?’

Her voice trembled and almost broke upon his name.

‘I knew nothing of it myself until yesterday,’ he answered ‘I have had letters of the most urgent importance, and must answer them in person.’

‘How long do you expect to be away,’ she asked.

‘The one wise thing,’ he answered, ‘I could do would be to stay away altogether.’

‘Ah, Paul,’ she half whispered, wreathing her arm through his, ‘there is your “fool’s dream” again. What do you mean by the “fool’s dream”? Haven’t we been happy for a time?’

‘Is it happiness,’ Paul asked, ‘to pay for a week’s emptiness and longing with one minute of delirium? Is it a happy thing to be so set on one unattainable hope as to be able, dreaming or waking, to think of nothing else? A man is not to be made happy by the life I live.’

‘Paul,’ she whispered, ‘what more can you ask than I have given you?’

‘Everything,’ he answered.

She drew her arm away lingeringly. He let it go, and for a minute they walked in silence side by side. They reached the avenue, and turned back again.

‘Can you tell me anything,’ she asked after this pause—‘do you care to tell me anything about your business in England.’

‘That’s simple enough,’ he answered. ‘I am within some few months of poverty, and I must get to work again. I have had a tremendous letter from old Darco, slanging me for breach of faith, and for having sent him a piece of intolerably bad work. I have deserved every word he has to say, and now I must make amends to him.’

‘You have not been fortunate in your work lately?’ she asked.

‘I have not been fortunate,’ he answered; ‘I have been so far from fortunate that’ I have been writing like an untrained schoolboy. I could have done better before I was fifteen.’

‘But why is that? she asked. ‘Your mind should only just now be ripening. Your time is all your own.’

‘There is not one minute of my time my own,’ he answered in a smouldering wrathfulness.

‘Why not?’ she questioned.

‘Come,’ said Paul, ‘isn’t that just a little disingenuous? Don’t you know why not? Here am I,’ he went on, ‘as I do most solemnly believe, as madly in love as ever man was in the history of the world; petted, encouraged, and caressed, and ignored, and repulsed, until in the insane weakness of my own nature I have let all manhood ooze out of me. I am unlike Hamlet, my dear Gertrude. I am both to be fretted and played upon.’

‘Played upon?’ she said reproachfully.

‘Played upon,’ he repeated with what sounded like a weighty deliberation.

Gertrude began to cry, and set a dainty handkerchief to her eyes, but she said nothing, and Paul’s only resource was to go on talking, to keep himself in sight of his own injuries.

‘You and I made a bargain, Gertrude: we were to be friends, and no more than friends. You have known all along how much it cost me to keep within those limits; and have you helped me? I put that to your conscience.’

‘Helped you?’ she asked, pausing once more in her walk, and looking up at him in an innocent bewilderment.

‘Helped me,’ he repeated stonily. ‘The words are plain enough.’

There was a garden-seat near at hand. She hastened to it, and sinking down upon it, seemed to surrender herself to tears. He moved moodily after her, and stood looking down at the pathway, tracing haphazard figures on its moss-grown surface with the cane he carried.

‘I understand you now,’ sobbed Gertrude. ‘I have a right to reproach myself because my own undisciplined heart has gone beyond control sometimes; but does it lie in your province, Paul, to blame me for that? Have I not an equal right,’ she went on, ‘to tell you that you have not helped me in the daily struggle I have had to make? You are unjust, you are ungenerous. I could never have believed it of you.’

‘I can foresee nothing,’ Paul said, ‘but misery.’

‘Nor can I,’ she answered. She rose and faced him, and in the patch of moonlight in which she stood he could see that her tears at least were real. ‘What you have to say to me, in effect,’ she said, with an air of sudden quiet dignity, but with a quiver in her voice, ‘is just this: that I am a heartless coquette, and have never cared for you; that I have wilfully lured you on to your own unhappiness. If you really think that, Paul, if it means anything more than a mere passing gust of temper, we had better say good-bye at once. I have at least an equal right to bring the same charge against you, but I should disdain to harbour such a thought about you. There are many ways in which you may be cruel to a woman, Paul, and be forgiven, but you must not wound her pride in that way. That is the cruellest stab of all. The blade is poisoned, dear, and the wound will rankle for a lifetime.’

‘Tell me,’ he said, with his eyes blazing upon her, and the guarded voice in which he spoke shaking—‘tell me that you have really cared for me; tell me, on your conscience and your honour, that you have not deliberately led me to this madness.’

‘You can ask me that? she said. ‘You can insult me so?’

‘I ask it,’ he responded.

‘If my conduct has not shown it clearly,’ said Gertrude, ‘it is quite in vain to protest. I have given you better proof than words.’

‘There is only one proof,’ Paul answered. ‘Are you strong enough to brave the world with me?’

‘No, no,’ she whispered; ‘you must not ask me that I am not afraid of the world, but I am afraid of my own conscience.’

‘Do you think,’ he asked passionately, ‘that love could not sanctify a union such as ours? Be my Georges Sand, and I will be your De Musset; be my Stella, and I will be your Swift.’

‘You choose your instances unfortunately, Mr. Armstrong,’ Gertrude answered. ‘Georges and Alfred lived to write vile and bitter books about each other, and Stella broke her heart under the despotism of a brute. I do not care for such a prospect.’

The ‘Mr. Armstrong ‘lashed him like an actual whip, and under the sting of it he barely followed the meaning of what came after. He was so staggered that he could only repeat the words:

‘Mr. Armstrong.’

‘You force me to my defence,’ she answered gently. ‘I am a woman, Paul; but I have my code of honour.’

‘Im Gott’s und Teufel’s namen,’ he groaned, ‘what is it? You give me lips and arms; you have sworn you love me. What is loyalty?’

She drew herself to her full height:

‘I do not pretend to define loyalty,’ she said; ‘but I know it when I see it. It may be less definite than insult; but the last, at least, is clearly outlined. I have been mistaken, and I will correct my error now. Good-bye, Mr. Armstrong.’

‘Good-bye,’ said Paul.

She lingered for a mere instant as if in expectation of some further adieu, but he had none to offer. He saw no more clearly now into the truth than he had done at the beginning of the interview, but he had in a measure hardened himself by the spoken definition of his own attitude, and, partly because he could not as yet retreat from it, he permitted her to go without another word She floated away in the alternate soft splendour of the moon and the deep shadow of the overhanging boughs, and he watched her gloomily until her figure disappeared at the end of the avenue. He stood for a minute or two with a vacant mind, digging his walking-cane into the dry, friable earth at his feet, and scoring the thin, scum-like growth of moss upon it with unmeaning lines. Then he lit a cigar, and, avoiding the crowded vestibule, skirted the dark western wall of the hotel, and so walked homeward. The thing was done now, and, whether it were rightly done or wrongly he cared very little for the moment He stood at one of those pauses of emotion in which the mind is able logically to balance pros and cons without the intervention of any gust of feeling. If Gertrude were really what she professed to be, he had acted with great cruelty. If she were not what she professed to be, he had acted with great wisdom for the first time in his life so far as the woman as protagonist was concerned He looked at the probabilities on both sides with a cynical coolness which would have been impossible to him at any earlier stage in his career. He had met but two men who had known the Baroness de Wyeth well, and they had both looked upon her from pretty much the same standpoint. Ralston’s view was the more genial, but even in his opinion she was a born flirt, a creature who loved to tyre her chariot-wheels with hearts; and in the view of the coarser mind she was a coquette mere and simple—a Queen Rabesqurat, who kept a sackful of the human eyes which had turned to her in adoration. Then, in spite of momentary indifference, his nerves tingled and his blood sparkled at the memory of that rare and fleeting instant at which she had seemed to surrender herself to his embraces, and to make him immortal with a kiss. All the same, he could look on that fine second’s immortality with a cold indifference when the thrill was over. Granted the very lowest scale for passion, could the thing be real? Could he, for example, have stayed the torrent of his own blood in full course? He laughed to think of it, and a line and a half of his favourite poet sang in his brain:

‘And thy passions matched with mine Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.’

On the whole he began to conceive that he had done rightly, and in that half-belief, which drew slowly towards conviction, he went to bed and slept in a stolidity which surprised him later. The fact was that he was less resolved than tired.

Whilst he was at his deepest sleep a thundering summons at his door aroused him. A dream which came between the first prelude to this orchestral drumming and his awaking had advised him of a fainter disturbance, but by the time he was fairly awake the knocking had grown so exigent that it bade fair to raise the house.

‘Come in I’ he cried, and suddenly remembering that he had locked the door before getting into bed, he scrambled out in the darkness and turned back the key. ‘What the devil is the matter here?’ he asked, and the night porter of the hotel handed him a letter.

‘I was told, sir,’ he said, in indifferent French, ‘to deliver this at once, but the messenger is gone, and there is no answer called for.’

There was light enough in the corridor to read by, and Paul recognised Gertrude’s superscription.

‘Thank you,’ he answered. ‘Light the gas for me in my room, and that will do.’

The man obeyed, bowed himself out, and went his way, closing the door behind him.

The letter Paul held in his hand was bulky, and when he had broken the envelope open he found that it held no fewer than seven sheets of Gertrude’s crested paper. They were all covered in a hasty and sprawling hand, and on the first page was a scrawled date and a ‘Sir’ which had been written with so much energy that the upward sweeping course of the pen had bespattered the whole white surface with inky dots of greater or less magnitude.

‘I had thought you my friend,’ the epistle began; ‘you have professed to be something more, and, as ‘have heard you say, the greater should include the less.’

There the writing suddenly changed in character, and the letter went on, as it were, in calmer and more measured cali-graphic accents.

‘How could you treat me so, knowing my friendship and even my foolish fondness? Was it not cruel to urge me as you did? I will confess to you what I have striven in vain to disguise. Had we met in earlier days, had I known you before I was bound in honour to the course I am compelled to run until my footsteps lead me to my grave, I might have been a happy woman. But a woman may love, and may yet place her honour before everything. I shall not care if, when I am dead and gone, you choose to boast that you won a woman’s heart, and I will not even put you on your honour now to keep this silly secret; but you shall not go from me without my assurance of this one fact. When I married, marriage was to me a sacrament, and if it were not for that——— But no more of this, dear Paul Dear, dear, and dearest Paul! I hardly know how I am writing, but the anguish you have caused me is unspeakable, and I am not guarded in my words. A woman’s heart may err, and her principle of honour may yet be strong. I bid you good-bye with an aching heart, and I wish you all good fortune. It would seem that our stars are in opposition to each other, and fighting against each other in their courses. I agree with you in thinking that we are best apart, but I shall watch your career with a more than sisterly devotion, and my heart tells me that I shall have the right to acclaim your future.’

The letter said much more than this so far as the mere extension of the same sentiments might appear to be concerned, but in effect this was all until the final paragraph was reached.

‘I have adhered to duty,’ this ran, ‘and I will. Nothing—neither the thought of your suffering nor of my own—shall draw me from it, but I recognise none the less the kindred soul I should have met had I been fortunate—as I am far from being. Write this in your private memoirs of me: “She loved too well, yet wisely,” and think sometimes that it is possible for a woman to feel sometimes like a man, and to think I “could not love thee, dear, so well, loved I not honour more.”

‘I shall not add another word to this,’ Gertrude concluded, ‘except to say, I wish you all prosperity, all happiness. But just this remember always, that if I were a mischievous influence in your life, I meant it far otherwise, and I am always your devoted friend and well-wisher.

‘G. DEW.’

For some reason or another by no means clear to himself the letter moved Paul less than it seemed to him that it should have done. He read it sitting in his pyjamas on the bedside, kicking his bare heels against the valance, and when he had done with it he tossed it on to the centre table, on which his manuscripts, now too rarely looked at, lay scattered, and said rather grimly:

‘Footlights.’

Then he mused awhile, half desiring to confirm the word, and half recalling it. He had made many desperate efforts to be loyal in his thoughts, but he was less disposed to struggle in that direction than he had been. His mind strayed back to Ralston, and to the bibulous explorer. Memory went further than either of them, and carried him back to the days when he had broken his career in two for the sake of Miss Belmont, old Darco’s Middle Jarley Prown.’ He had played the flat traitor to Darco once already for the sake of one woman, and now, as he began to see, he was once more using him very ill for the sake of another. He sat kicking his heels against the valance of the bed, and thinking. May Gold, Norah MacMulty, the dreadful hour of the lost innocence, Claudia, Annette, Gertrude—what an incredible list of follies for one man to have committed! He grew intensely bitter and self-disdainful.

There was no answer for the letter of the heart-wounded Gertrude. He was not quite sure whether he were a mere insensate brute or no, but he packed, and took the homeward train without a word of farewell. If Gertrude’s friendship were a real thing, he was a beast unspeakable. If it were a selfish sentimental sham—why, then—anything. He began to taste life with a very nausea of weariness.

But when London was reached, and the physical fatigue of travel shaken off, and the tornado of Darco’s energies had engulfed him as of old, he found himself another man. Darco was terrible at their earliest interview.

‘Led me haf a look at you,’ he said, dragging Paul to his study-window. ‘What haf you peen doing with yourseluf? I have known an Armstrong for some years who was rather a glever vellow. Vot? Ant now I gome agross an Armstrong who is a plithering impecile. Eh?’

‘Now, my dear Darco,’ Paul answered, ‘I dare say that your criticism of the stuff I sent you is quite just I haven’t, indeed, the remotest doubt about it But I have been out of health and worried, and now I am here for work. You shall have the best I can give you.’

‘I shall speag to you,’ said Darco, ‘with an egsdreme blain-ness. I haf not forgotten our first parting. You did not dreat me well.’

‘I know I didn’t,’ Paul said.

‘Ant now,’ continued Darco, refusing to be mollified all at once, ‘you haf wasted months of valuable dime, ant you ant I are both the poorer by hundrets ant hundrets of pounts. I will haf your bromise, your sacred wort of honour, before I will gollaborate again, that you will no more blay with me these farces. I like you, yourself, Armstrong. I am very font of you. I haf a very creat atmiration for your worg. But you haf not been reliaple. You haf no right to resent what I am sayink.’

‘I have some excuses, of which I can’t talk,’ said Paul; ‘but I don’t resent what you are saying. I am very sorry to have kept you waiting. I promise you that you shall have all my time and all my best energies for this one spell of work in any case. After that——’

‘Veil,’ said Darco, ‘afder that?

‘Heaven knows!’ Paul answered. ‘Don’t say any more just now, Darco. Let us go to work.’

Darco looked at him for a second or two, and began then to stump about the room.

‘Goot! he said suddenly; ‘let us go to work.’

To work they went. Whatever else might be said for Darco, it was at least impossible to brood in his society. The man’s tireless enthusiasm did one of two things for everybody with whom he encountered. It repelled either through terror or distaste, or it inspired a sentiment which corresponded with itself. He frightened timid people; he made the pugnacious angry and resentful. But here and there he kindled a fire.

Paul’s love for work had gone to sleep very soundly, but Darco’s storming awoke it, and in a day or two the new remedy had got hold of him, and he came back to a moderately healthy state of mind. He wrote to Gertrude, and she responded, and a peace was patched between them, but it was not easy on either side to climb back to the old existence of confidence, and Paul at least was shaken in allegiance. Nor was this all, for he had begun to have some apprehension of his own character, and to take soundings of those emotional shallows which had always seemed to him so profound. When a man has once learned to distrust his own raptures they do not rise easily.

He took up his quarters with Darco, and they worked all day together, and, on occasion, far into the night, for they were entered on a race against time, and an extended run of the piece which then held the stage at Darco’s theatre meant loss. Act by act was put in rehearsal as it left the writers’ hands, and the final scenes were written in the theatre itself, and the parts copied in one of the dressing-rooms. For the last fortnight of the work there was time to think of nothing else, and when the very tag was written there was labour enough left to satisfy even Darco.

No better medicine for Paul’s malady could have been prescribed than he found in this ceaseless mental occupation. It shook him out of his useless moonings, and brought his mind back to its old healthy elasticity, and when at last the decisive night came, and the play went with a roar from start to finish, he went to bed to sleep the clock round, and awoke to triumph.

Out of an idea which had cropped up in the course of work, and had been abandoned as being too heavy to be employed as a mere episode, the indefatigable Darco had already constructed a new plot, and was fain to begin at once upon its development. But Paul insisted upon at least a fortnight’s holiday, and carried his point. There was no further fear of financial embarrassment for many months to come. Annette’s liabilities were paid. A lawyer was engaged to make settled arrangements with her, and for awhile there was a clear prospect and free air to breathe. Then came the new work, carried on at a less fiery pressure than the old, but yet pursued with diligence. It lasted six months, and was not likely to be in demand for another half-year. Gertrude was back in Paris, and thither went Paul, prepared to study the platonic theory in a more philosophical spirit than he had hitherto displayed. She was charming. She could not easily cease to be charm ing, but she maddened no longer, and if she had had a heart at all, her lover’s extreme placidity might have piqued her into love. It could not do that, but it served to introduce upon the scene an episode of some humour.

Madame la Baronne de Wyeth could not exist without an adorer. It was an agreeable thing enough to have two at a time, and would have been agreeable to have had a dozen had the creatures been manageable. Mr. Ricardo P. Janes, of Boston, Massachusetts, was a young man of excellent family connections, and in enjoyment of liberal means. He was a very handsome boy of four- or five-and-twenty, and having a taste for art and the Muses in general, he was studying in the atelier of a famous French painter. He took life seriously, and wrote nice verses. He was simple and enthusiastic, pure-minded and romantic, and altogether eligible as a candidate for a place in the list of Gertrude’s soulful friends. When Paul reached Paris he had an immediate introduction to this young gentleman, and conceived a real liking for him. There was hardly an escape from the recognition of the fact that Mr. Janes, in his serious, romantic way, was in love with Gertrude, but it was evident that he had been held well in hand, and that with him the platonic path had strict barriers, beyond which he did not even aspire to pass. He made Paul his confidant when the two came to intimacy, as they very easily did; and from his simple talk the elder learned again a great deal of what he had learned already from Gertrude—how, for instance, there was a certain isolation of the soul from which it was impossible to escape even in the closest and most genuine friendship, and how the Individual was never truly apprehended by any other Individual, but was doomed to go its way in eternal solitude towards its goal. Mr. Janes, despite his romanticisms and enthusiasms, was in the main a sensible young man, and he would not have said these things had he known or guessed that their ground of inspiration would be recognised by his companion. But Gertrude’s ideas had seemed to him—they would appear to have seemed so to many for a time—to hold a most true and beautiful though sad philosophy, and he was of that time of life when such thoughts are full of serious interest and charm. Had Mr. Janes appeared nine months earlier under the same conditions, Paul would probably have conceived a fiery hatred for him, but now he felt a kind of superiority to him, which was in part cynical, and in part affectionate, and in part self-disdainful. He had gone thrilling at all this for years on end, because it came from the lips of a pretty and engaging woman, with whom it was no more than a canting shibboleth. Of course it helped to disillusionize him, and he began even to see that Gertrude was not as beautiful as he had once believed her to be. This is almost a fatal symptom in the history of love’s decay, unless the perception be attended, as it is in happy cases, by the perception of new beauties whose presence more than atones for the absence of the old. And Paul did not find new beauties. Gertrude was simply a pretty woman now, and a pretty woman is a very different creature from an angel whose effulgence so dazzles that it blinds the eyes. It was pleasant enough to philander with her, to touch the skirts of topics which had once been dangerous, but were dangerous no longer, but the glamour was gone, and young Mr. Janes had done as much to banish it in a single fortnight as Ralston and the bibulous explorer and the nine months of diligent labour all put together.

It happened that the Baroness herself planned a little pleasure trip, which resulted in the closing of this chapter of Paul Armstrong’s life. It placed him incidentally in a position of extreme awkwardness, and he was never able to decide whether he had acted well or ill in it. The point may be reckoned a fine one.

Gertrude had made accidental acquaintance with a charming old house in the neighbourhood of Fontainebleau, a country chÂteau of the old-world sort, which was for sale, with all its furniture, its plate and its pictures, and a rather exceptionally good library. Failing a sale, it was provisionally for hire, and she, having, always, practically unlimited funds at her disposal, was inclined to take it and to spend some half-year in retirement, within easy reach of the capital and her friends, whilst she added the last touches to a volume of poems on which she had been engaged from time to time for some three or four years past She was in negotiation for the place, and just by way of experiment she had thought it a charming idea to give a little—a very little—house-party there. There were to be only five people—Gertrude’s own Knickerbocker sheepdog, then one Comtesse de Cassault, Gertrude herself, and Mr. Janes and Paul. The servants of the departed family were available for a day; a chef and one or two kitchen assistants might be sent down from Paris. The party would assemble in time for luncheon, would spend the afternoon in a country excursion, would return to dinner, and so Pariswards by a special train. It was a pretty programme, and would cost M. le Baron de Wyeth a pretty penny, but the last consideration was Gertrude’s affair alone. The Comtesse de Cassault was a beautiful person, a flirt of the demurest kind. The Knickerbocker was virtually nobody. In effect it was a partie carrÉe and bade fair to be enjoyable.

It was the very loveliest of October days, and Paul began his adventures by a little accident to the voiture which should have borne him to the station. It was no very great matter, but he found himself entangled with the horses of an omnibus, and though he escaped personal injury, apart from an inconsiderable bruise or two, he had to make an awkward jump for safety, and, falling, split the knees of his trousers, and plastered his shirt-cuffs with the mud which an overnight shower had left behind. This petty disaster involved a return home, and the loss of his train. He despatched a wire and made inquiries. The quickest way of arriving at his destination appeared to be to book by train to a point some ten miles from it, and then to secure a conveyance of some sort to get the rest of the distance. He was turned out at a lonely rural station with no vehicle for hire within miles. Very good, he would make the best of a small misfortune, and would walk. He got directed by a stupid peasant, and set off in the wrong direction. When he had walked some two miles out of his way, he made further inquiries and retraced his steps. The roads were a little heavy, the sun was hot, and Paul of late had taken but little physical exercise. When, after three hours hard walking, he reached the retired chateau which was the scene of the day’s festivity, luncheon had been over two hours before, and Gertrude and her party were away for a drive. But Mr. Armstrong was expected and was welcomed, and when he had a little repaired the ravages the journey had made upon his aspect, he was provided with a pleasant little repast and a bottle of excellent Moselle. The room in which he took this meal was on the ground-floor, and was an extension from the original building. It stood a few feet above a sloping lawn, and it had wide French windows on either side of it A balcony travelled round it on three sides, and on that which faced the sun heavy velvet curtains had been drawn. A full light which brought no dazzle with it came in from the windows opposite.

When Paul had finished his meal, which he ate with great relish after the unaccustomed exercise of the day, he explored the balcony, and finding on the sunny side one of those long American cane-chairs which, when furnished with cushions, offer so agreeable a lounge, he sat down there and smoked a cigar. A while ago the small contretemps which had delayed him would have caused him profound trouble, or, at least, he would have made himself think so; but he took the matter quite easily now, and occupied himself in rehearsing the history he would have to tell on his hostess’s return. The day was exquisitely mild, the temperature perfect, now that he was no longer in hasty effort; he had eaten heartily, had half emptied the bottle of excellent Moselle, and he was very tired. Before he had begun to realize fairly the fact that he was drowsy, he had fallen asleep.

When he awoke there were voices in the room he had quitted some two hours before. The sun had gone down behind the trees in the blue distance, and he was just a trifle stiff and chilly. He was barely conscious of these things, when the voice of young Mr. Janes startled him broad awake.

‘It is dangerous,’ said Mr. Janes; ‘it is seriously dangerous.’

‘Silly boy!’ said Gertrude, in a voice half mocking and half caressing. ‘How can an old woman like me be dangerous to the peace of a child like you?’

‘It is not dangerous to you, Gertrude,’ said Mr. Janes, with a tremor which bespoke him very much in earnest ‘I know your purity, and I reverence it. I know that I have done wrong in speaking as I have done, but I could not help it I must go.’

‘No, Ricardo,’ said Gertrude, ‘you must not go. You must only put this foolish fancy by—it is only a foolish fancy—and there will be no need to disturb a friendship which has been so sweet, so valuable, to both of us.’

By this time it occurred suddenly to Paul that he had perhaps heard enough, but he had hitherto been held so entirely by surprise that he had not had time to think that this conversation was not intended for his ears. He arose, and began to creep stealthily away, when he saw that the curtains through which he had passed from the room were partly open as he had left them. And whilst he stood irresolute, wondering how he should escape, and trying to devise some means of declaring his presence, the talk went on.

‘Oh, damn it all!’ he said to himself desperately. ‘It isn’t my fault. I know that line of country pretty well, and I have been so often introduced to it that I am hardly an intruder on it. I can’t get away without being seen, and that will be awkward for everybody. And I can’t stay here and listen to this rot.’

But the talk went on, and what with the absurd misery of his own position and the well-known lines the conversation followed, he was fairly aflame with embarrassment and self-disdain. Exactly what this gifted and amiable young ass of a Bostonian was doing, and saying, and thinking, and feeling, he had been doing, saying, thinking, feeling a year ago. And Gertrude was playing with young Mr. Janes exactly as she had played with young Mr. Armstrong. Mr. Janes took a good deal of coaxing—more than Paul had done—but the trained coquette was equal to the task, and she brought him to the climax just as she had brought his predecessor. And there was the one little embrace granted, and there was a rustle of skirts, and the click of a door-latch, and Gertrude’s voice said, ‘You will stay now Ricardo?’ and Ricardo groaned. Then the door was closed, and there was silence. Then Ricardo groaned again, and Paul heard his disordered footsteps as he paced the room. The unwilling listener returned to the cane-chair and stretched himself upon it with great stealth, and feigned sleep in case of contingencies. But after five dreary minutes young Mr. Janes withdrew, and the way of escape was open.

Paul made his way to the drawing-room, and found there the Knickerbocker lady and the demure Countess, with whom he had already a slight but agreeable acquaintance. He had had time to recover his self-possession, and though he wished himself a hundred miles away, he did his best to set the kite of conversation flying. He was making an attempt in his somewhat halting French to tell the story of his delay when Gertrude entered, and he told the tale to her, leaving her to translate it. His narrative was so vivacious that she trilled with laughter at it, and broke in upon it with a rapid paraphrase in French here and there, so that she and the Countess and the historian were all laughing heartily together when Mr. Janes came in with a sombre countenance, and made so funereal an effort to join in the mirth that Paul was fiercely tickled. And whilst he made a comedy of the morning’s accident for her amusement, he was thinking all the while, ‘You heartless, cruel, dangerous little jade!’ and thinking it, too, with a real savagery of hatred. ‘How many have you betrayed,’ he asked in his heart ‘To how many hungers of passion deliberately awakened have you offered that heart of stone?’

The Baroness knew him mainly on the sentimental side, but that evening he launched out as a raconteur, and was gay and brilliant. Even Mr. Janes was awakened to sporadic laughter at the dinner-table, where they sat by preconcerted arrangement without the formality of evening-dress, and fared admirably from the hors d’oeuvres to the coffee—a flawless meal. And dinner being over, they drove away under a noble moon to the railway-station, and bowled back to Paris.

Paul, still with an air of gaiety, begged Gertrude to accord him ten minutes on the following day.

‘I have something to tell you,’ he said, ‘in which I am sure you will take the warmest interest. May I trespass on your time for just ten minutes in the morning? I got a curious little bit of intelligence to-day which will carry me, I fancy, to the United States.’

‘The United States? cried Gertrude. ‘I can send you to the nicest people there. But shall you be long away?’

‘I shall be able to tell you that to-morrow,’ Paul answered. ‘May I?

‘Certainly,’ she replied graciously. ‘Shall we all breakfast together at twelve?’

‘I am sorry,’ said Paul, ‘but for me that is impossible. But if I may see you at a quarter to the hour——’

‘Certainly,’ she said again.

‘Thank you,’ he said, and turning away somewhat abruptly, as he thought afterwards, he began to talk to the irresponsive Janes, who sat, as it were, in fog.

‘You come with me?’ said Paul to the young Bostonian when the terminus was reached, and the final adieux had been said amongst the rest.

‘Well, no,’ said Mr. Janes. ‘I am a little out of sorts for some reason or another, and I think that I’ll go home.’

‘Well, then,’ said Paul, ‘I go with you. It’s all the same; but I have something to say to you. It won’t keep, Janes, and whether you and I like it or no, it has to be spoken.’

‘Oh,’ said Janes, ‘that sounds serious!’

‘Come to the Rue Castiglione with me,’ Paul answered, ‘and I will tell you exactly how serious it is.’

‘Very well,’ the younger man answered, and Paul having chartered a fiacre, they drove home together.

Arrived at his hotel, Paul ordered, and his guest refused, a whisky-and-soda, and the two sat down at a table in Paul’s bedroom.

‘Mr. Janes,’ he began, ‘I hope very sincerely that what am about to say will not wound you—much. It is sure to hurt you a little at first, but it is meant in friendship. Let me begin by telling you that for some three years of my life, more or less, I made an unexampled ass of myself about a certain lady. And now let me confess that I was put into a beastly corner this afternoon, and could not help overhearing a conversation in which the lady held a part. That conversation was identical in result, and almost identical in terms, with one in which I took part about a year and a half ago.’

Young Mr. Janes set his elbows on the table, and rested his face upon his hands. He was silent for a long time, but at last he said:

‘I cannot judge of the delicacy or otherwise of your statement, Mr. Armstrong, but I leave Paris to-morrow morning, and I shall not return. I should have gone, sir, without this revelation from you, and I am sorry that you have made it.’

‘I am not,’ said Paul stanchly. ‘Nor do I think that you will be in a little time. I wasted three years, Mr. Janes, in worship at that empty shrine, and when I had most accidentally and most unwittingly surprised another worshipper——’

‘Don’t mock at it, for God’s sake!’ said young Mr. Janes. ‘I’m going home. Good-night. I think you were right to tell me. I think I should have done the same. You’re going——’ He paused there, and looked up with a white face. ‘You’re going to see her in the morning?’

‘On that one errand,’ Paul answered.

‘Well,’ said Mr. Janes, ‘good-bye, Armstrong.’

He offered his hand, and Paul took it warmly. Janes went dejectedly away.

At ten minutes before the strike of noon next day Paul and Gertrude met for the last time. She came gaily towards him with both hands outstretched in welcome, but her face changed as he stood before her with no recognition of her proffered salute.

‘What is the matter?’ she asked.

‘I am here to tell you, Gertrude,’ he responded. ‘I told you a part of my adventures of yesterday, but I did not tell you all. When my walk was finished I had luncheon, and after luncheon I lay down on a chair upon the veranda and fell asleep there. I awoke at the moment when Mr. Janes was telling you that it was dangerous. I had not the courage to break in upon a conversation so intimate, and—may I say it?—so familiar. I could not get away without a risk of being seen, and so I stayed where I was.’

She had gone white to the lips, and she was trembling, but she faced him.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I had thought you a little worthier than that! An eavesdropper!’

‘An eavesdropper!’ Paul answered. ‘That is understood; but not a willing one. You have wasted a good part of my life, but of that I have no right to complain. But I do lament a little that you should have taken away my last illusion. I had learned a little of your adorable sex, Gertrude, before I met you, and nothing in my experience had taught me to think well of it. But I believed I had found in you a proof of the monstrous falsity of the belief into which I was being thrust. Well, you see, you confirm that belief. I shall go to my grave now in the certainty that one-half the world is made to wheedle and befool the other half, and that every woman is born to treason as the sparks fly upward. You lied to me, Gertrude, and I believed you. You lured me on deliberately, with a cold cruelty for which there is no name. I shall never hate you as well as I have loved you, for I have a rather poor capacity in that way. You found a man with a bruised heart, and for your own wicked pleasure you set to work to torture him. There is no use in words, and I have said all I came to say.’

That was the end of that episode, and a minute later he was striding along the street. In three days he was aboard ship at Havre, and the disconsolate Janes was one of his fellow-voyagers.