In a year from that time Nadine Napraxine sat in her white boudoir in her house in Paris.

It was the eve of her marriage with Othmar. She was lying indolently amongst her white cushions; her eyes were thoughtful, her mouth was smiling.

‘If one could only feel all that rapture which he feels, how charming life would be!’ she mused, with her old sceptical wonder at the ardour and the follies of men.

Passion was for once acceptable to her, but it was still scarcely shared; she still surveyed and analysed its forces with a vague astonishment, a lingering derision. Love had reached her more nearly and enveloped her more warmly than she had ever believed that it would do; yet there remained beneath it the smile of her habitual raillery, the doubt of her habitual incredulity. Her life had obtained the fruition of all its desires, and the future was hers in perfect triumph, so far as any human knowledge can possess it. Yet, in the vague melancholy which floated like a little cloud at times upon her careless and amused mockery of herself, she thought more than once of the device emblazoned on the wall of AmyÔt, Nutrio et extinguo—it is the motto of all human passions.

‘Yes, this is love, no doubt,’ she said to him this day; ‘it is even ecstasy—as yet. But shall we never know the recoil? Shall we never tire? Will there be no reaction, no fatigue, no level lengths of habit and of tedium? Who can keep always at this height?’

‘We shall—for ever!’ murmured her lover, with the intensity of his adoration for her trembling on his lips. ‘To doubt it is to doubt me!’

‘No,’ said Nadine Napraxine, with her fleeting mysterious smile. ‘No; I do not doubt you at all; I only doubt myself—and human nature!’

She sighed a little, even as she smiled. She, who had divined so much more of the truth than the blunter perceptions of a man had ever suspected, she, with that melancholy presage and superstitious sadness which were dormant in her blood, thought, with a passing chill of dread:

‘Our joy is like the basil plant of Isabella. It blossoms out of death!’

THE END.