As Mr. Ducksmith appeared to be entirely unperceptive of his wife's spiritual expansion, Aristide grew bolder in his apostolate. He complimented Mrs. Ducksmith to his face. He presented her daily with flowers. He scarcely waited for the heavy man's back to be turned to make love to her. If she did not believe that she was the most beautiful, the most ravishing, the most delicate-souled woman in the world, it was through no fault of Aristide. Mr. Ducksmith went his pompous, unseeing way. At every stopping-place stacks of English daily papers awaited him. Sometimes, while Aristide was showing them the sights of a town—to which, by the way, he insisted on being conducted—he would extract a newspaper from his pocket and read with dull and dogged stupidity. Once Aristide caught him reading the advertisements for cooks and housemaids. In these circumstances Mrs. Ducksmith spiritually expanded at an alarming rate; and, correspondingly, dwindled the progress of Mr. Ducksmith's sock.

They arrived at Perigueux, in Perigord, land of truffles, one morning, in time for lunch. Towards the end of the meal the maitre d'hotel helped them to great slabs of pate de foie gras, made in the house—most of the hotel-keepers in Perigord make pate de foie gras, both for home consumption and for exportation—and waited expectant of their appreciation. He was not disappointed. Mr. Ducksmith, after a hesitating glance at the first mouthful, swallowed it, greedily devoured his slab, and, after pointing to his empty plate, said, solemnly:—

"Plou."

Like Oliver, he asked for more.

"Tiens!" thought Aristide, astounded. "Is he, too, developing a soul?"

But, alas! there were no signs of it when they went their dreary round of the town in the usual ramshackle open cab. The cathedral of Saint-Front, extolled by Aristide and restored by Abadie—a terrible fellow who has capped with tops of pepper-castors every pre-Gothic building in France—gave him no thrill; nor did the picturesque, tumble-down ancient buildings on the banks of the Dordogne, nor the delicate Renaissance facades in the cool, narrow Rue du Lys.

"We will now go back to the hotel," said Mr. Ducksmith.

"But have we seen it all?" asked his wife.

"By no means," said Aristide.

"We will go back to the hotel," repeated her husband, in his expressionless tones. "I have seen enough of Perigueux."

This was final. They drove back to the hotel. Mr. Ducksmith, without a word, went straight into the salon, leaving Aristide and his wife standing in the vestibule.

"And you, madame," said Aristide; "are you going to sacrifice the glory of God's sunshine to the manufacture of woollen socks?"

She smiled—she had caught the trick at last—and said, in happy submission: "What would you have me do?"

With one hand he clasped her arm; with the other, in a superb gesture, he indicated the sunlit world outside.

"Let us drain together," cried he, "the loveliness of Perigueux to its dregs!"

Greatly daring, she followed him. It was a rapturous escapade—the first adventure of her life. She turned her comely face to him and he saw smiles round her lips and laughter in her eyes. Aristide, worker of miracles, strutted by her side choke-full of vanity. They wandered through the picturesque streets of the old town with the gaiety of truant children, peeping through iron gateways into old courtyards, venturing their heads into the murk of black stairways, talking (on the part of Aristide) with mothers who nursed chuckling babes on their doorsteps, crossing the thresholds, hitherto taboo, of churches, and meeting the mystery of coloured glass and shadows and the heavy smell of incense.

Her hand was on his arm when they entered the flagged courtyard of an ancient palace, a stately medley of the centuries, with wrought ironwork in the balconies, tourelles, oriels, exquisite Renaissance ornaments on architraves, and a great central Gothic doorway, with great window-openings above, through which was visible the stone staircase of honour leading to the upper floors. In a corner stood a mediaeval well, the sides curiously carved. One side of the courtyard blazed in sunshine, the other lay cool and grey in shadow. Not a human form or voice troubled the serenity of the spot. On a stone bench against the shady wall Aristide and Mrs. Ducksmith sat down to rest.

"Voila!" said Aristide. "Here one can suck in all the past like an omelette. They had the feeling for beauty, those old fellows."

"I have wasted twenty years of my life," said Mrs. Ducksmith, with a sigh. "Why didn't I meet someone like you when I was young? Ah, you don't know what my life has been, Mr. Pujol."

"Why not Aristide when we are alone? Why not, Henriette?"

He too had the sense of adventure, and his eyes were more than usually compelling and his voice more seductive. For some reason or other, undivined by Aristide—over-excitement of nerves, perhaps—she burst into tears.

"Henriette! Henriette, ne pleurez pas."

His arm crept round her—he knew not how; her head sank on his shoulder, she knew not why—faithlessness to her lord was as far from her thoughts as murder or arson; but for one poor little moment in a lifetime it is good to weep on someone's shoulder and to have someone's sympathetic arm around one's waist.

"Pauvre petite femme! And is it love she is pining for?"

She sobbed; he lifted her chin with his free hand—and what less could mortal apostle do?—he kissed her on her wet cheek.

A bellow like that of an angry bull caused them to start asunder. They looked up, and there was Mr. Ducksmith within a few yards of them, his face aflame, his rabbit's eyes on fire with rage. He advanced, shook his fists in their faces.

"I've caught you! At last, after twenty years, I've caught you!"

"Monsieur," cried Aristide, starting up, "allow me to explain."

He swept Aristide aside like an intercepting willow-branch, and poured forth a torrent of furious speech upon his wife.

"I have hated you for twenty years. Day by day I have hated you more. I've watched you, watched you, watched you! But, you sly jade, you've been too clever for me till now. Yes; I followed you from the hotel. I dogged you. I foresaw what would happen. Now the end has come. I've hated you for twenty years—ever since you first betrayed me——"

Mrs. Ducksmith, who had sat with overwhelmed head in her hands, started bolt upright, and looked at him like one thunderstruck.

"I betrayed you?" she gasped, in bewilderment. "My God! When? How? What do you mean?"

He laughed—for the first time since Aristide had known him—but it was a ghastly laugh, that made the jowls of his cheeks spread horribly to his ears; and again he flooded the calm, stately courtyard with the raging violence of words. The veneer of easy life fell from him. He became the low-born, petty tradesman, using the language of the hands of his jam factory. No, he had never told her. He had awaited his chance. Now he had found it. He called her names....



Aristide interposed, his Southern being athrob with the insults heaped upon the woman.

"Say that again, monsieur," he shouted, "and I will take you up in my arms like a sheep and throw you down that well."

The two men glared at one another, Aristide standing bent, with crooked fingers, ready to spring at the other's throat. The woman threw herself between them.

"For Heaven's sake," she cried, "listen to me! I have done no wrong. I have done no wrong now—I never did you wrong, so help me God!"

Mr. Ducksmith laughed again, and his laugh re-echoed round the quiet walls and up the vast staircase of honour.

"You'd be a fool not to say it. But now I've done with you. Here, you, sir. Take her away—do what you like with her; I'll divorce her. I'll give you a thousand pounds never to see her again."

"Goujat! Triple goujat!" cried Aristide, more incensed than ever at this final insult.

Mrs. Ducksmith, deadly white, swayed sideways, and Aristide caught her in his arms and dragged her to the stone bench. The fat, heavy man looked at them for a second, laughed again, and sped through the porte-cochere. Mrs. Ducksmith quickly recovered from her fainting attack, and gently pushed the solicitous Aristide away.

"Merciful Heaven!" she murmured. "What is to become of me?"

The last person to answer the question was Aristide. For once in his adventurous life resource failed him. He stared at the woman for whom he cared not the snap of a finger, and who, he knew, cared not the snap of a finger for him, aghast at the havoc he had wrought. If he had set out to arouse emotion in these two sluggish breasts he had done so with a vengeance. He had thought he was amusing himself with a toy cannon, and he had fired a charge of dynamite.

He questioned her almost stupidly—for a man in the comic mask does not readily attune himself to tragedy. She answered with the desolate frankness of a lost soul. And then the whole meaning—or the lack of meaning—of their inanimate lives was revealed to him. Absolute estrangement had followed the birth of their child nearly twenty years ago. The child had died after a few weeks. Since then he saw—and the generous blood of his heart froze as the vision came to him—that the vulgar, half-sentient, rabbit-eyed bloodhound of a man had nursed an unexpressed, dull, implacable resentment against the woman. It did not matter that the man's suspicion was vain. To Aristide the woman's blank amazement at the preposterous charge was proof enough; to the man the thing was real. For nearly twenty years the man had suffered the cancer to eat away his vitals, and he had watched and watched his blameless wife, until now, at last, he had caught her in this folly. No wonder he could not rest at home; no wonder he was driven, Io-wise, on and on, although he hated travel and all its discomforts, knew no word of a foreign language, knew no scrap of history, had no sense of beauty, was utterly ignorant, as every single one of our expensively State-educated English lower classes is, of everything that matters on God's earth; no wonder that, in the unfamiliarity of foreign lands, feeling as helpless as a ballet-dancer in a cavalry charge, he looked to Cook, or Lunn, or the Agence Pujol to carry him through his uninspired pilgrimage. For twenty years he had shown no sign of joy or sorrow or anger, scarcely even of pleasure or annoyance. A tortoise could not have been more unemotional. The unsuspected volcano had slumbered. To-day came disastrous eruption. And what was a mere laughing, crying child of a man like Aristide Pujol in front of a Ducksmith volcano?

"What is to become of me?" wailed Mrs. Ducksmith again.

"Ma foi!" said Aristide, with a shrug of his shoulders. "What's going to become of anyone? Who can foretell what will happen in a minute's time? Tiens!" he added, kindly laying his hand on the sobbing woman's shoulder. "Be comforted, my poor Henriette. Just as nothing in this world is as good as we hope, so nothing is as bad as we fear. Voyons! All is not lost yet. We must return to the hotel."

She weepingly acquiesced. They walked through the quiet streets like children whose truancy had been discovered and who were creeping back to condign punishment at school. When they reached the hotel, Mrs. Ducksmith went straight up to the woman's haven, her bedroom.

Aristide tugged at his Vandyke beard in dire perplexity. The situation was too pregnant with tragedy for him to run away and leave the pair to deal with it as best they could. But what was he to do? He sat down in the vestibule and tried to think. The landlord, an unstoppable gramophone of garrulity, entering by the street-door and bearing down upon him, put him to flight. He, too, sought his bedroom, a cool apartment with a balcony outside the French window. On this balcony, which stretched along the whole range of first-floor bedrooms, he stood for a while, pondering deeply. Then, in an absent way, he overstepped the limit of his own room-frontage. A queer sound startled him. He paused, glanced through the open window, and there he saw a sight which for the moment paralyzed him.



Recovering command of his muscles, he tiptoed his way back. He remembered now that the three rooms adjoined. Next to his was Mr. Ducksmith's, and then came Mrs. Ducksmith's. It was Mr. Ducksmith whom he had seen. Suddenly his dark face became luminous with laughter, his eyes glowed, he threw his hat in the air and danced with glee about the room. Having thus worked off the first intoxication of his idea, he flung his few articles of attire and toilet necessaries into his bag, strapped it, and darted, in his dragon-fly way, into the corridor and tapped softly at Mrs. Ducksmith's door. She opened it. He put his finger to his lips.

"Madame," he whispered, bringing to bear on her all the mocking magnetism of his eyes, "if you value your happiness you will do exactly what I tell you. You will obey me implicitly. You must not ask questions. Pack your trunks at once. In ten minutes' time the porter will come for them."

She looked at him with a scared face. "But what am I going to do?"

"You are going to revenge yourself on your husband."

"But I don't want to," she replied, piteously.

"I do," said he. "Begin, chere madame. Every moment is precious."

In a state of stupefied terror the poor woman obeyed him. He saw her start seriously on her task and then went downstairs, where he held a violent and gesticulatory conversation with the landlord and with a man in a green baize apron summoned from some dim lair of the hotel. After that he lit a cigarette and smoked feverishly, walking up and down the pavement. In ten minutes' time his luggage with that of Mrs. Ducksmith was placed upon the cab. Mrs. Ducksmith appeared trembling and tear-stained in the vestibule.

* * * * *

The man in the green baize apron knocked at Mr. Ducksmith's door and entered the room.

"I have come for the baggage of monsieur," said he.

"Baggage? What baggage?" asked Mr. Ducksmith, sitting up.

"I have descended the baggage of Monsieur Pujol," said the porter in his stumbling English, "and of madame, and put them in a cab, and I naturally thought monsieur was going away, too."

"Going away!" He rubbed his eyes, glared at the porter, and dashed into his wife's room. It was empty. He dashed into Aristide's room. It was empty, too. Shrieking inarticulate anathema, he rushed downstairs, the man in the green baize apron following at his heels.

Not a soul was in the vestibule. No cab was at the door. Mr. Ducksmith turned upon his stupefied satellite.

"Where are they?"

"They must have gone already. I filled the cab. Perhaps Monsieur Pujol and madame have gone before to make arrangements."

"Where have they gone to?"

"In Perigueux there is nowhere to go to with baggage but the railway station."

A decrepit vehicle with a gaudy linen canopy hove in sight. Mr. Ducksmith hailed it as the last victims of the Flood must have hailed the Ark. He sprang into it and drove to the station.

There, in the salle d'attente, he found Aristide mounting guard over his wife's luggage. He hurled his immense bulk at his betrayer.

"You blackguard! Where is my wife?"

"Monsieur," said Aristide, puffing a cigarette, sublimely impudent and debonair, "I decline to answer any questions. Your wife is no longer your wife. You offered me a thousand pounds to take her away. I am taking her away. I did not deign to disturb you for such a trifle as a thousand pounds, but, since you are here——"

He smiled engagingly and held out his curved palm. Mr. Ducksmith foamed at the corners of the small mouth that disappeared into the bloodhound jowls.

"My wife!" he shouted. "If you don't want me to throw you down and trample on you."

A band of loungers, railway officials, peasants, and other travellers awaiting their trains, gathered round. As the altercation was conducted in English, which they did not understand, they could only hope for the commencement of physical hostilities.

"My dear sir," said Aristide, "I do not understand you. For twenty years you hold an innocent and virtuous woman under an infamous suspicion. She meets a sympathetic soul, and you come across her pouring into his ear the love and despair of a lifetime. You have more suspicion. You tell me you will give me a thousand pounds to go away with her. I take you at your word. And now you want to stamp on me. Ma foi! it is not reasonable."

Mr. Ducksmith seized him by the lapels of his coat. A gasp of expectation went round the crowd. But Aristide recognized an agonized appeal in the eyes now bloodshot.

"My wife!" he said hoarsely. "I want my wife. I can't live without her. Give her back to me. Where is she?"

"You had better search the station," said Aristide.

The heavy man unconsciously shook him in his powerful grasp, as a child might shake a doll.

"Give her to me! Give her to me, I say! She won't regret it."



"You swear that?" asked Aristide, with lightning quickness.

"I swear it, by God! Where is she?"

Aristide disengaged himself, waved his hand airily towards Perigueux, and smiled blandly.

"In the salon of the hotel, waiting for you to prostrate yourself on your knees before her."

Mr. Ducksmith gripped him by the arm.

"Come back with me. If you're lying I'll kill you."

"The luggage?" queried Aristide.

"Confound the luggage!" said Mr. Ducksmith, and dragged him out of the station.

A cab brought them quickly to the hotel. Mr. Ducksmith bolted like an obese rabbit into the salon. A few moments afterwards Aristide, entering, found them locked in each other's arms.

They started alone for England that night, and Aristide returned to the directorship of the Agence Pujol. But he took upon himself enormous credit for having worked a miracle.

* * * * *

"One thing I can't understand," said I, after he had told me the story, "is what put this sham elopement into your crazy head. What did you see when you looked into Mr. Ducksmith's bedroom?"

"Ah, mon vieux, I did not tell you. If I had told you, you would not have been surprised at what I did. I saw a sight that would have melted the heart of a stone. I saw Ducksmith wallowing on his bed and sobbing as if his heart would break. It filled my soul with pity. I said: 'If that mountain of insensibility can weep and sob in such agony, it is because he loves—and it is I, Aristide, who have reawakened that love.'"

"Then," said I, "why on earth didn't you go and fetch Mrs. Ducksmith and leave them together?"

He started from his chair and threw up both hands.

"Mon Dieu!" cried he. "You English! You are a charming people, but you have no romance. You have no dramatic sense. I will help myself to a whisky and soda."



VIII

THE ADVENTURE OF THE FICKLE GODDESS

It may be remembered that Aristide Pujol had aged parents, browned and wrinkled children of the soil, who had passed all their days in the desolation of Aigues-Mortes, the little fortified, derelict city in the salt marshes of Provence. Although they regarded him with the same unimaginative wonder as a pair of alligators might regard an Argus butterfly, their undoubted but freakish progeny, and although Aristide soared high above their heads in all phases of thought and emotion, the mutual ties remained strong and perdurable. Scarcely a year passed without Aristide struggling somehow south to visit ses vieux, as he affectionately called them, and whenever Fortune shed a few smiles on him, one or two at least were sure to find their way to Aigues-Mortes in the shape of, say, a silver-mounted umbrella for his father or a deuce of a Paris hat for the old lady's Sunday wear. Monsieur and Madame Pujol had a sacred museum of these unused objects—the pride of their lives. Aristide was entirely incomprehensible, but he was a good son. A bad son in France is rare.

But once Aristide nearly killed his old people outright. An envelope from him contained two large caressive slips of bluish paper, which when scrutinized with starting eyes turned out to be two one-thousand-franc notes. Mon Dieu! What had happened? Had Aristide been robbing the Bank of France? They stood paralyzed and only recovered motive force when a neighbour suggested their reading the accompanying letter. It did not explain things very clearly. He was in Aix-les-Bains, a place which they had never heard of, making his fortune. He was staying at the Hotel de l'Europe, where Queen Victoria (they had heard of Queen Victoria) had been contented to reside, he was a glittering figure in a splendid beau-monde, and if ses vieux would buy a few cakes and a bottle of vin cachete with the enclosed trifle, to celebrate his prosperity, he would deem it the privilege of a devoted son. But Pujol senior, though wondering where the devil he had fished all that money from, did not waste it in profligate revelry. He took the eighty pounds to the bank and exchanged the perishable paper for one hundred solid golden louis which he carried home in a bag curiously bulging beneath his woollen jersey and secreted it with the savings of his long life in the mattress of the conjugal bed.

"If only he hasn't stolen it," sighed the mother.

"What does it matter, since it is sewn up there all secure?" said the old man. "No one can find it."

The Provencal peasant is as hard-headed and practical as a Scottish miner, and if left alone by the fairies would produce no imaginative effect whatever upon his generation; but in his progeniture he is more preposterously afflicted with changelings than any of his fellows the world over, which, though ethnologically an entirely new proposition, accounts for a singular number of things and inter alia for my dragon-fly friend, Aristide Pujol.

Now, Aristide, be it said at the outset, had not stolen the money. It (and a vast amount more) had been honestly come by. He did not lie when he said that he was staying at the Hotel de l'Europe, Aix-les-Bains, honoured by the late Queen Victoria (pedantic accuracy requires the correction that the august lady rented the annexe, the Villa Victoria, on the other side of the shady way—but no matter—an hotel and its annexe are the same thing) nor did he lie in boasting of his prodigious prosperity. Aristide was in clover. For the first, and up to now as I write, the only, time in his life he realized the gorgeous visions of pallid years. He was leading the existence of the amazing rich. He could drink champagne—not your miserable tisane at five francs a quart—but real champagne, with year of vintage and gout american or gout anglais marked on label, fabulously priced; he could dine lavishly at the Casino restaurants or at Nikola's, prince of restaurateurs, among the opulent and the fair; he could clothe himself in attractive raiment; he could step into a fiacre and bid the man drive and not care whither he went or what he paid; he could also distribute five-franc pieces to lame beggars. He scattered his money abroad with both hands, according to his expansive temperament; and why not, when he was drawing wealth out of an inexhaustible fount? The process was so simple, so sure. All you had to do was to believe in the cards on which you staked your money. If you knew you were going to win, you won. Nothing could be easier.

He had drifted into Aix-les-Bains from Geneva on the lamentable determination of a commission agency in the matter of some patent fuel, with a couple of louis in his pocket forlornly jingling the tale of his entire fortune. As this was before the days when you had to exhibit certificates of baptism, marriage, sanity and bank-balance before being allowed to enter the baccarat rooms, Aristide paid his two francs and made a bee line for the tables. I am afraid Aristide was a gambler. He was never so happy as when taking chances; his whole life was a gamble, with Providence holding the bank. Before the night was over he had converted his two louis into fifty. The next day they became five hundred. By the end of a week his garments were wadded with bank notes whose value amounted to a sum so stupendous as to be beyond need of computation. He was a celebrity in the place and people nudged each other as he passed by. And Aristide passed by with a swagger, his head high and the end of his pointed beard sticking joyously up in the air.

We see him one August morning, in the plentitude of his success, lounging in a wicker chair on the shady lawn of the Hotel de l'Europe. He wore white buckskin shoes—I begin with these as they were the first point of his person to attract the notice of the onlooker—lilac silk socks, a white flannel suit with a zig-zag black stripe, a violet tie secured by a sapphire and diamond pin, and a rakish panama hat. On his knees lay the Matin; the fingers of his left hand held a fragrant corona; his right hand was uplifted in a gesture, for he was talking. He was talking to a couple of ladies who sat near by, one a mild-looking Englishwoman of fifty, dressed in black, the other, her daughter, a beautiful girl of twenty-four. That Aristide should fly to feminine charms, like moth to candle, was a law of his being; that he should lie, with shriveled wings, at Miss Errington's feet was the obvious result. Her charms were of the winsome kind to which he was most susceptible. She had an oval face, a little mouth like crumpled rose petals (so Aristide himself described it), a complexion the mingling of ivory and peach blossom (Aristide again), a straight little nose, appealing eyes of the deepest blue veiled by sweeping lashes and fascinating fluffiness of dark hair over a pure brow. She had a graceful figure, and the slender foot below her white pique skirt was at once the envy and admiration of Aix-les-Bains.

Aristide talked. The ladies listened, with obvious amusement. In the easy hotel way he had fallen into their acquaintance. As the man of wealth, the careless player who took five-hundred-louis banks at the table with the five-louis minimum, and cleared out the punt, he felt it necessary to explain himself. I am afraid he deviated from the narrow path of truth.

"What perfect English you speak," Miss Errington remarked, when he had finished his harangue and had put the corona between his lips. Her voice was a soft contralto.

"I have mixed much in English society, since I was a child," replied Aristide, in his grandest manner. "Fortune has made me know many of your county families and members of Parliament."

Miss Errington laughed. "Our M. P.'s are rather a mixed lot, Monsieur Pujol."

"To me an English Member of Parliament is a high-bred conservative. I do not recognize the others," said Aristide.

"Unfortunately we have to recognize them," said the elder lady with a smile.

"Not socially, madame. They exist as mechanical factors of the legislative machine; but that is all." He swelled as if the blood of the Montmorencys and the Colignys boiled in his veins. "We do not ask them into our drawing rooms. We do not allow them to marry our daughters. We only salute them with cold politeness when we pass them in the street."

"It's astonishing," said Miss Errington, "how strongly the aristocratic principle exists in republican France. Now, there's our friend, the Comte de Lussigny, for instance——"

A frown momentarily darkened the cloudless brow of Aristide Pujol. He did not like the Comte de Lussigny——

"With Monsieur de Lussigny," he interposed, "it is a matter of prejudice, not of principle."

"And with you?"

"The reasoned philosophy of a lifetime, mademoiselle," answered Aristide. He turned to Mrs. Errington.

"How long have you known Monsieur de Lussigny, madame?"

She looked at her daughter. "It was in Monte Carlo the winter before last, wasn't it, Betty? Since then we have met him frequently in England and Paris. We came across him, just lately, at Trouville. I think he's charming, don't you?"

"He's a great gambler," said Aristide.

Betty Errington laughed again. "But so are you. So is mamma. So am I, in my poor little way."

"We gamble for amusement," said Aristide loftily.

"I'm sure I don't," cried Miss Betty, with merry eyes—and she looked adorable—"When I put my despised five-franc piece down on the table I want desperately to win, and when the horrid croupier rakes it up I want to hit him—Oh! I want to hit him hard."

"And when you win?"

"I'm afraid I don't think of the croupier at all," said Miss Betty.

Her mother smiled indulgently and exchanged a glance with Aristide. This pleased him; there was an agreeable little touch of intimacy in it. It confirmed friendly relations with the mother. What were his designs as regards the daughter he did not know. They were not evil, certainly. For all his southern blood, Latin traditions and devil-may-care upbringing, Aristide, though perhaps not reaching our divinely set and therefore unique English standard of morality, was a decent soul; further, partly through his pedagogic sojourn among them, and partly through his childish adoration of the frank, fair-cheeked, northern goddesses talking the quick, clear speech, who passed him by when he was a hunted little devil of a chasseur in the Marseilles cafe, he had acquired a peculiarly imaginative reverence for English girls. The reverence, indeed, extended to English ladies generally. Owing to the queer circumstances of his life they were the only women of a class above his own, with whom he had associated on terms of equality. He had, then, no dishonorable designs as regards Miss Betty Errington. On the other hand, the thoughts of marriage had as yet not entered his head. You see, a Frenchman and an Englishman or an American, view marriage from entirely different angles. The Anglo-Saxon of honest instincts, attracted towards a pretty girl at once thinks of the possibilities of marriage; if he finds them infinitely remote, he makes romantic love to her in the solitude of his walks abroad or of his sleepless nights, and, in her presence, is as dumb and dismal as a freshly hooked trout. The equally honest Gaul does nothing of the kind. The attraction in itself is a stimulus to adventure. He makes love to her, just because it is the nature of a lusty son of Adam to make love to a pretty daughter of Eve. He lives in the present. The rest doesn't matter. He leaves it to chance. I am speaking, be it understood, not of deep passions—that is a different matter altogether—but of the more superficial sexual attractions which we, as a race, take so seriously and puritanically, often to our most disastrous undoing, and which the Latin light-heartedly regards as essential, but transient phenomena of human existence. Aristide made the most respectful love in the world to Betty Errington, because he could not help himself. "Tonnerre de Dieu!" he cried when from my Britannic point of view, I talked to him on the subject. "You English whom I try to understand and can never understand are so funny! It would have been insulting to Miss Betty Errington—tiens!—a purple hyacinth of spring—that was what she was—not to have made love to her. Love to a pretty woman is like a shower of rain to hyacinths. It passes, it goes. Another one comes. Qu'importe? But the shower is necessary—Ah! sacre gredin, when will you comprehend?"

All this to make as clear as an Englishman, in the confidence of a changeling child of Provence can hope to do, the attitude of Aristide Pujol towards the sweet and innocent Betty Errington with her mouth like crumpled rose-petals, her ivory and peach-blossom complexion, her soft contralto voice, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, as per foregoing bald description, and as per what can, by imaginative effort, be pictured from the Pujolic hyperbole, by which I, the unimportant narrator of these chronicles, was dazzled and overwhelmed.

"I'm afraid I don't think of the croupier at all," said Betty.

"Do you think of no one who brings you good fortune?" asked Aristide. He threw the Matin on the grass, and, doubling himself up in his chair regarded her earnestly. "Last night you put five louis into my bank——"

"And I won forty. I could have hugged you."

"Why didn't you? Ah!" His arms spread wide and high. "What I have lost!"

"Betty!" cried Mrs. Errington.

"Alas, Madame," said Aristide, "that is the despair of our artificial civilization. It prohibits so much spontaneous expression of emotion."

"You'll forgive me, Monsieur Pujol," said Mrs. Errington dryly, "but I think our artificial civilization has its advantages."

"If you will forgive me, in your turn," said Aristide, "I see a doubtful one advancing."

A man approached the group and with profuse gestures took off a straw hat which he thrust under his right arm, exposing an amazingly flat head on which the closely cropped hair stood brush-fashion upright. He had an insignificant pale face to which a specious individuality was given by a moustache with ends waxed up to the eyes and by a monocle with a tortoise shell rim. He was dressed (his valet had misjudged things—and valets like the rest of us are fallible) in what was yesterday a fairly white flannel suit.

"Madame—Mademoiselle." He shook hands with charming grace. "Monsieur." He bowed stiffly. Aristide doffed his Panama hat with adequate ceremony. "May I be permitted to join you?"

"With pleasure, Monsieur de Lussigny," said Mrs. Errington.

Monsieur de Lussigny brought up a chair and sat down.

"What time did you get to bed, last night?" asked Betty Errington. She spoke excellently pure French, and so did her mother.

"Soon after we parted, mademoiselle, quite early for me but late for you. And you look this morning as if you had gone to bed at sundown and got up at dawn."

Miss Betty's glance responsive to the compliment filled Aristide with wrath. What right had the Comte de Lussigny, a fellow who consorted with Brazilian Rastaquoueres and perfumed Levantine nondescripts, to win such a glance from Betty Errington?

"If Mademoiselle can look so fresh," said he, "in the artificial atmosphere of Aix, what is there of adorable that she must not resemble in the innocence of her Somersetshire home?"

"You cannot imagine it, Monsieur," said the Count; "but I have had the privilege to see it."

"I hope Monsieur Pujol will visit us also in our country home, when we get back," said Mrs. Errington with intent to pacificate. "It is modest, but it is old-world and has been in our family for hundreds of years."

"Ah, these old English homes!" said Aristide.

"Would you care to hear about it?"

"I should," said he.

He drew his chair courteously a foot or so nearer that of the mild lady; Monsieur de Lussigny took instant advantage of the move to establish himself close to Miss Betty. Aristide turned one ear politely to Mrs. Errington's discourse, the other ragingly and impotently to the whispered conversation between the detached pair.

Presently a novel fell from the lady's lap. Aristide sprang to his feet and restored it. He remained standing. Mrs. Errington consulted a watch. It was nearing lunch time. She rose, too. Aristide took her a pace or two aside.

"My dear Mrs. Errington," said he, in English. "I do not wish to be indiscreet—but you come from your quiet home in Somerset and your beautiful daughter is so young and inexperienced, and I am a man of the world who has mingled in all the society of Europe—may I warn you against admitting the Comte de Lussigny too far into your intimacy."

She turned an anxious face. "Monsieur Pujol, is there anything against the Count?"

Aristide executed the large and expressive shrug of the Southerner.

"I play high at the tables for my amusement—I know the principal players, people of high standing. Among them Monsieur de Lussigny's reputation is not spotless."

"You alarm me very much," said Mrs. Errington, troubled.

"I only put you on your guard," said he.

The others who had risen and followed, caught them up. At the entrance to the hotel the ladies left the men elaborately saluting. The latter, alone, looked at each other.

"Monsieur."

"Monsieur."

Each man raised his hat, turned on his heel and went his way. Aristide betook himself to the cafe on the Place Carnot on the side of the square facing the white Etablissement des Bains, with a stern sense of having done his duty. It was monstrous that this English damask rose should fall a prey to so detestable a person as the Comte de Lussigny. He suspected him of disgraceful things. If only he had proof. Fortune, ever favoring him, stood at his elbow. She guided him straight to a table in the front row of the terrace where sat a black-haired, hard-featured though comely youth deep in thought, in front of an untouched glass of beer. At Aristide's approach he raised his head, smiled, nodded and said: "Good morning, sir. Will you join me?"

Aristide graciously accepted the invitation and sat down. The young man was another hotel acquaintance, one Eugene Miller of Atlanta, Georgia, a curious compound of shrewdness and simplicity, to whom Aristide had taken a fancy. He was twenty-eight and ran a colossal boot-factory in partnership with another youth and had a consuming passion for stained-glass windows. From books he knew every square foot of old stained-glass in Europe. But he had crossed the Atlantic for the first time only six weeks before, and having indulged his craving immoderately, had rested for a span at Aix-les-Bains to recover from aesthetic indigestion. He had found these amenities agreeable to his ingenuous age. He had also, quite recently, come across the Comte de Lussigny. Hence the depth of thought in which Aristide discovered him. Now, the fact that North is North and South is South and that never these twain shall meet is a proposition all too little considered. One of these days when I can retire from the dull but exacting avocation of tea-broking in the City, I think I shall write a newspaper article on the subject. Anyhow, I hold the theory that the Northerners of all nations have a common characteristic and the Southerners of all nations have a common characteristic, and that it is this common characteristic in each case that makes North seek and understand North and South seek and understand South. I will not go further into the general proposition; but as a particular instance I will state that the American of the South and the Frenchman of the South found themselves in essential sympathy. Eugene Miller had the unfearing frankness of Aristide Pujol.

"I used rather to look down upon Europe as a place where people knew nothing at all," said he. "We're sort of trained to think it's an extinct volcano, but it isn't. It's alive. My God! It's alive. It's Hell in the shape of a Limburger cheese. I wish the whole population of Atlanta, Georgia, would come over and just see. There's a lot to be learned. I thought I knew how to take care of myself, but this tortoise-shell-eyed Count taught me last night that I couldn't. He cleaned me out of twenty-five hundred dollars——"

"How?" asked Aristide, sharply.

"Ecarte."

Aristide brought his hand down with a bang on the table and uttered anathemas in French and Provencal entirely unintelligible to Eugene Miller; but the youth knew by instinct that they were useful, soul-destroying curses and he felt comforted.

"Ecarte! You played ecarte with Lussigny? But my dear young friend, do you know anything of ecarte?"

"Of course," said Miller. "I used to play it as a child with my sisters."

"Do you know the jeux de regle?"

"The what?"

"The formal laws of the game—the rules of discards——"

"Never heard of them," said Eugene Miller.

"But they are as absolute as the Code Napoleon," cried Aristide. "You can't play without knowing them. You might as well play chess without knowing the moves."

"Can't help it," said the young man.

"Well, don't play ecarte any more."

"I must," said Miller.

"Comment?"

"I must. I've fixed it up to get my revenge this afternoon—in my sitting room at the hotel."

"But it's imbecile!"

The sweep of Aristide's arm produced prismatic chaos among a tray-full of drinks which the waiter was bringing to the family party at the next table. "It's imbecile," he cried, as soon as order was apologetically and pecuniarily restored. "You are a little mutton going to have its wool taken off."

"I've fixed it up," said Miller. "I've never gone back on an engagement yet in my own country and I'm not going to begin this side."

Aristide argued. He argued during the mechanical absorption of four glasses of vermouth-cassis—after which prodigious quantity of black currant syrup he rose and took the Gadarene youth to Nikola's where he continued the argument during dejeuner. Eugene Miller's sole concession was that Aristide should be present at the encounter and, backing his hand, should have the power (given by the rules of the French game) to guide his play. Aristide agreed and crammed his young friend with the jeux de regle and pate de foie gras.

The Count looked rather black when he found Aristide Pujol in Miller's sitting room. He could not, however, refuse him admittance to the game. The three sat down, Aristide by Miller's side, so that he could overlook the hand and, by pointing, indicate the cards that it was advisable to play. The game began. Fortune favored Mr. Eugene Miller. The Count's brow grew blacker.

"You are bringing your own luck to our friend, Monsieur Pujol," said he, dealing the cards.

"He needs it," said Aristide.

"Le roi," said the Count, turning up the king.

The Count won the vole, or all five tricks, and swept the stakes towards him. Then, fortune quickly and firmly deserted Mr. Miller. The Count besides being an amazingly fine player, held amazingly fine hands. The pile of folded notes in front of him rose higher and higher. Aristide tugged at his beard in agitation. Suddenly, as the Count dealt a king as trump card, he sprang to his feet knocking over the chair behind him.

"You cheat, monsieur. You cheat!"

"Monsieur!" cried the outraged dealer.

"What has he done?"

"He has been palming kings and neutralizing the cut. I've been watching. Now I catch him," cried Aristide in great excitement. "Ah, sale voleur! Maintenant je vous tiens!"

"Monsieur," said the Comte de Lussigny with dignity, stuffing his winnings into his jacket pocket. "You insult me. It is an infamy. Two of my friends will call upon you."

"And Monsieur Miller and I will kick them over Mont Revard."

"You cannot treat gens d'honneur in such a way, monsieur." He turned to Miller, and said haughtily in his imperfect English, "Did you see the cheat, you?"

"I can't say that I did," replied the young man. "On the other hand that torch-light procession of kings doesn't seem exactly natural."

"But you did not see anything! Bon!"

"But I saw. Isn't that enough, hein?" shouted Aristide brandishing his fingers in the Count's face. "You come here and think there's nothing easier than to cheat young foreigners who don't know the rules of ecarte. You come here and think you can carry off rich young English misses. Ah, sale escroc! You never thought you would have to reckon with Aristide Pujol. You call yourself the Comte de Lussigny. Bah! I know you——" he didn't, but that doesn't matter—"your dossier is in the hands of the prefect of Police. I am going to get that dossier. Monsieur Lepine is my intimate friend. Every autumn we shoot together. Aha! You send me your two galley-birds and see what I do to them."

The Comte de Lussigny twirled the tips of his moustache almost to his forehead and caught up his hat.

"My friends shall be officers in the uniform of the French Army," he said, by the door.

"And mine shall be two gendarmes," retorted Aristide. "Nom de Dieu!" he cried, after the other had left the room. "We let him take the money!"

"That's of no consequence. He didn't get away with much anyway," said young Miller. "But he would have if you hadn't been here. If ever I can do you a return service, just ask."

Aristide went out to look for the Erringtons. But they were not to be found. It was only late in the afternoon that he met Mrs. Errington in the hall of the hotel. He dragged her into a corner and in his impulsive fashion told her everything. She listened white faced, in great distress.

"My daughter's engaged to him. I've only just learned," she faltered.

"Engaged? Sacrebleu! Ah, le goujat!"—for the second he was desperately, furiously, jealously in love with Betty Errington. "Ah, le sale type! Voyons! This engagement must be broken off. At once! You are her mother."

"She will hear of nothing against him."

"You will tell her this. It will be a blow; but——"

Mrs. Errington twisted a handkerchief between helpless fingers. "Betty is infatuated. She won't believe it." She regarded him piteously. "Oh, Monsieur Pujol, what can I do? You see she has an independent fortune and is over twenty-one. I am powerless."

"I will meet his two friends," exclaimed Aristide magnificently—"and I will kill him. Voila!"

"Oh, a duel? No! How awful!" cried the mild lady horror-stricken.

He thrust his cane dramatically through a sheet of a newspaper, which he had caught up from a table. "I will run him through the body like that"—Aristide had never handled a foil in his life—"and when he is dead, your beautiful daughter will thank me for having saved her from such an execrable fellow."

"But you mustn't fight. It would be too dreadful. Is there no other way?"

"You must consult first with your daughter," said Aristide.

He dined in the hotel with Eugene Miller. Neither the Erringtons nor the Comte de Lussigny were anywhere to be seen. After dinner, however, he found the elder lady waiting for him in the hall. They walked out into the quiet of the garden. She had been too upset to dine, she explained, having had a terrible scene with Betty. Nothing but absolute proofs of her lover's iniquity would satisfy her. The world was full of slanderous tongues; the noblest and purest did not escape. For herself, she had never been comfortable with the Comte de Lussigny. She had noticed too that he had always avoided the best French people in hotels. She would give anything to save her daughter. She wept.

"And the unhappy girl has written him compromising letters," she lamented.

"They must be got back."

"But how? Oh, Monsieur Pujol, do you think he would take money for them?"

"A scoundrel like that would take money for his dead mother's shroud," said Aristide.

"A thousand pounds?"

She looked very haggard and helpless beneath the blue arc-lights. Aristide's heart went out to her. He knew her type—the sweet gentlewoman of rural England who comes abroad to give her pretty daughter a sight of life, ingenuously confident that foreign watering-places are as innocent as her own sequestered village.

"That is much money, chere madame," said Aristide.

"I am fairly well off," said Mrs. Errington.

Aristide reflected. At the offer of a smaller sum the Count would possibly bluff. But to a Knight of Industry, as he knew the Count to be, a certain thousand pounds would be a great temptation. And after all to a wealthy Englishwoman what was a thousand pounds?

"Madame," said he, "if you offer him a thousand pounds for the letters, and a written confession that he is not the Comte de Lussigny, but a common adventurer, I stake my reputation that he will accept."

They walked along for a few moments in silence; the opera had begun at the adjoining Villa des Fleurs and the strains floated through the still August air. After a while she halted and laid her hand on his sleeve.

"Monsieur Pujol, I have never been faced with such a thing, before. Will you undertake for me this delicate and difficult business?"

"Madame," said he, "my life is at the service of yourself and your most exquisite daughter." She pressed his hand. "Thank God, I've got a friend in this dreadful place," she said brokenly. "Let me go in." And when they reached the lounge, she said, "Wait for me here."

She entered the lift. Aristide waited. Presently the lift descended and she emerged with a slip of paper in her hand.

"Here is a bearer cheque, Monsieur Pujol, for a thousand pounds. Get the letters and the confession if you can, and a mother's blessing will go with you."

She left him and went upstairs again in the lift. Aristide athirst with love, living drama and unholy hatred of the Comte de Lussigny, cocked his black, soft-felt evening hat at an engaging angle on his head and swaggered into the Villa des Fleurs. As he passed the plebeian crowd round the petits-chevaux table—these were the days of little horses and not the modern equivalent of la boule—he threw a louis on the square marked 5, waited for the croupier to push him his winnings, seven louis and his stake on the little white horse, and walked into the baccarat room. A bank was being called for thirty louis at the end table.

"Quarante," said Aristide.

"Ajuge a quarante louis," cried the croupier, no one bidding higher.

Aristide took the banker's seat and put down his forty louis. Looking round the long table he saw the Comte de Lussigny sitting in the punt. The two men glared at each other defiantly. Someone went "banco." Aristide won. The fact of his holding the bank attracted a crowd round the table. The regular game began. Aristide won, lost, won again. Now it must be explained, without going into the details of the game, that the hand against the bank is played by the members of the punt in turn.

Suddenly, before dealing the cards, Aristide asked, "A qui la main?"

"C'est a Monsieur," said the croupier, indicating Lussigny.

"Il y a une suite," said Aristide, signifying, as was his right, that he would retire from the bank with his winnings. "The face of that gentleman does not please me."

There was a hush at the humming table. The Count grew dead white and looked at his fingernails. Aristide superbly gathered up his notes and gold, and tossing a couple of louis to the croupiers, left the table, followed by all eyes. It was one of the thrilling moments of Aristide's life. He had taken the stage, commanded the situation. He had publicly offered the Comte de Lussigny the most deadly insult and the Comte de Lussigny sat down beneath it like a lamb. He swaggered slowly through the crowded room, twirling his moustache, and went into the cool of the moonlit deserted garden beyond, where he waited gleefully. He had a puckish knowledge of human nature. After a decent interval, and during the absorbing interest of the newly constituted bank, the Comte de Lussigny slipped unnoticed from the table and went in search of Aristide. He found him smoking a large corona and lounging in one wicker chair with his feet on another, beside a very large whisky and soda.

"Ah, it's you," said he without moving.

"Yes," said the Count furiously.

"I haven't yet had the pleasure of kicking your friends over Mont Revard," said Aristide.

"Look here, mon petit, this has got to finish," cried the Count.

"Parfaitement. I should like nothing better than to finish. But let us finish like well-bred people," said Aristide suavely. "We don't want the whole Casino as witnesses. You'll find a chair over there. Bring it up."

He was enjoying himself immensely. The Count glared at him, turned and banged a chair over by the side of the table.

"Why do you insult me like this?"

"Because," said Aristide, "I've talked by telephone this evening with my good friend Monsieur Lepine, Prefect of Police of Paris."

"You lie," said the Count.

"Vous verrez. In the meantime, perhaps we might have a little conversation. Will you have a whisky and soda? It is one of my English habits."

"No," said the Count emphatically.

"You permit me then?" He drank a great draught. "You are wrong. It helps to cool one's temper. Eh bien, let us talk."

He talked. He put before the Count the situation of the beautiful Miss Errington. He conducted the scene like the friend of the family whose astuteness he had admired as a boy in the melodramas that found their way to Marseilles.

"Look," said he, at last, having vainly offered from one hundred to eight hundred pounds for poor Betty Errington's compromising letters. "Look——" He drew the cheque from his note-case. "Here are twenty-five thousand francs. The signature is that of the charming Madame Errington herself. The letters, and a little signed word, just a little word. 'Mademoiselle, I am a chevalier d'industrie. I have a wife and five children. I am not worthy of you. I give you back your promise.' Just that. And twenty-five thousand francs, mon ami."

"Never in life!" exclaimed the Count rising. "You continue to insult me."

Aristide for the first time abandoned his lazy and insolent attitude and jumped to his feet.

"And I'll continue to insult you, canaille that you are, all through that room," he cried, with a swift-flung gesture towards the brilliant doorway. "You are dealing with Aristide Pujol. Will you never understand? The letters and a confession for twenty-five thousand francs."

"Never in life," said the Count, and he moved swiftly away.

Aristide caught him by the collar as he stood on the covered terrace, a foot or two from the threshold of the gaming-room.

"I swear to you, I'll make a scandal that you won't survive."

The Count stopped and pushed Aristide's hand away.

"I admit nothing," said he. "But you are a gambler and so am I. I will play you for those documents against twenty-five thousand francs."

"Eh?" said Aristide, staggered for the moment.

The Comte de Lussigny repeated his proposition.

"Bon," said Aristide. "Tres bon. C'est entendu. C'est fait."

If Beelzebub had arisen and offered to play beggar-my-neighbour for his soul, Aristide would have agreed; especially after the large whisky and soda and the Mumm Cordon Rouge and the Napoleon brandy which Eugene Miller had insisted on his drinking at dinner.

"I have a large room at the hotel," said he.

"I will join you," said the Count. "Monsieur," he took off his hat very politely. "Go first. I will be there in three minutes."

Aristide trod on air during the two minutes' walk to the Hotel de l'Europe. At the bureau he ordered a couple of packs of cards and a supply of drinks and went to his palatial room on the ground floor. In a few moments the Comte de Lussigny appeared. Aristide offered him a two francs corona which was ceremoniously accepted. Then he tore the wrapping off one of the packs of cards and shuffled.

"Monsieur," said he, still shuffling. "I should like to deal two hands at ecarte. It signifies nothing. It is an experiment. Will you cut?"

"Volontiers," said the Count.

Aristide took up the pack, dealt three cards to the Count, three cards to himself, two cards to the Count, two to himself and turned up the King of Hearts as the eleventh card.

"Monsieur," said he, "expose your hand and I will expose mine."

Both men threw their hands face uppermost on the table. Aristide's was full of trumps, the Count's of valueless cards.

He looked at his adversary with his roguish, triumphant smile. The Count looked at him darkly.

"The ordinary card player does not know how to deal like that," he said with sinister significance.

"But I am not ordinary in anything, my dear sir," laughed Aristide, in his large boastfulness. "If I were, do you think I would have agreed to your absurd proposal? Voyons, I only wanted to show you that in dealing cards I am your equal. Now, the letters——" The Count threw a small packet on the table. "You will permit me? I do not wish to read them. I verify only. Good," said he. "And the confession?"

"What you like," said the Count, coldly. Aristide scribbled a few lines that would have been devastating to the character of a Hyrcanean tiger and handed the paper and fountain pen to the Count.

"Will you sign?"

The Count glanced at the words and signed.

"Voila," said Aristide, laying Mrs. Errington's cheque beside the documents. "Now let us play. The best of three games?"

"Good," said the Count. "But you will excuse me, monsieur, if I claim to play for ready money. The cheque will take five days to negotiate and if I lose, I shall evidently have to leave Aix to-morrow morning."

"That's reasonable," said Aristide.

He drew out his fat note-case and counted twenty-five one-thousand-franc notes on to the table. And then began the most exciting game of cards he had ever played. In the first place he was playing with another person's money for a fantastic stake, a girl's honour and happiness. Secondly he was pitted against a master of ecarte. And thirdly he knew that his adversary would cheat if he could and that his adversary suspected him of fraudulent designs. So as they played, each man craned his head forward and looked at the other man's fingers with fierce intensity.

Aristide lost the first game. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. In the second game, he won the vole in one hand. The third and final game began. They played slowly, carefully, with keen quick eyes. Their breathing came hard. The Count's lips parted beneath his uptwisted moustache showed his teeth like a cat's. Aristide lost sense of all outer things in the thrill of the encounter. They snarled the stereotyped phrases necessary for the conduct of the game. At last the points stood at four for Aristide and three for his adversary. It was Aristide's deal. Before turning up the eleventh card he paused for the fraction of a second. If it was the King, he had won. He flicked it neatly face upward. It was not the King.

"J'en donne."

"Non. Le roi."

The Count played and marked the King. Aristide had no trumps. The game was lost.

He sat back white, while the Count smiling gathered up the bank-notes.

"And now, Monsieur Pujol," said he impudently, "I am willing to sell you this rubbish for the cheque."

Aristide jumped to his feet. "Never!" he cried. Madness seized him. Regardless of the fact that he had nothing like another thousand pounds left wherewith to repay Mrs. Errington if he lost, he shouted: "I will play again for it. Not ecarte. One cut of the cards. Ace lowest."

"All right," said the Count.

"Begin, you."

Aristide watched his hand like cat, as he cut. He cut an eight. Aristide gave a little gasp of joy and cut quickly. He held up a Knave and laughed aloud. Then he stopped short as he saw the Count about to pounce on the documents and the cheque. He made a swift movement and grabbed them first, the other man's hand on his.

"Canaille!"

He dashed his free hand into the adventurer's face. The man staggered back. Aristide pocketed the precious papers. The Count scowled at him for an undecided second, and then bolted from the room.

"Whew!" said Aristide, sinking into his chair and wiping his face. "That was a narrow escape."

He looked at his watch. It was only ten o'clock. It had seemed as if his game with Lussigny had lasted for hours. He could not go to bed and stood confronted with anti-climax. After a while he went in search of Eugene Miller and having found him in solitary meditation on stained glass windows in the dim-lit grounds of the Villa, sat down by his side and for the rest of the evening poured his peculiar knowledge of Europe into the listening ear of the young man from Atlanta.

On the following morning, as soon as he was dressed, he learned from the Concierge that the Comte de Lussigny had left for Paris by the early train.

"Good," said Aristide.

A little later Mrs. Errington met him in the lounge and accompanied him to the lawn where they had sat the day before.

"I have no words to thank you, Monsieur Pujol," she said with tears in her eyes. "I have heard how you shamed him at the tables. It was brave of you."

"It was nothing." He shrugged his shoulders as if he were in the habit of doing deeds like that every day of his life. "And your exquisite daughter, Madame?"

"Poor Betty! She is prostrate. She says she will never hold up her head again. Her heart is broken."

"It is young and will be mended," said Aristide.

She smiled sadly. "It will be a question of time. But she is grateful to you, Monsieur Pujol. She realizes from what a terrible fate you have saved her." She sighed. There was a brief silence.

"After this," she continued, "a further stay in Aix would be too painful. We have decided to take the Savoy express this evening and get back to our quiet home in Somerset."

"Ah, madame," said Aristide earnestly. "And shall I not have the pleasure of seeing the charming Miss Betty again?"

"You will come and stay with us in September. Let me see? The fifteenth. Why not fix a date? You have my address? No? Will you write it down?" she dictated: "Wrotesly Manor, Burnholme, Somerset. There I'll try to show you how grateful I am."

She extended her hand. He bowed over it and kissed it in his French way and departed a very happy man.

The Erringtons left that evening. Aristide waylaid them as they were entering the hotel omnibus, with a preposterous bouquet of flowers which he presented to Betty, whose pretty face was hidden by a motor-veil. He bowed, laid his hand on his heart and said: "Adieu, mademoiselle."

"No," she said in a low voice, but most graciously, "Au revoir, Monsieur Pujol."

For the next few days Aix seemed to be tame and colourless. In an inexplicable fashion, too, it had become unprofitable. Aristide no longer knew that he was going to win; and he did not win. He lost considerably. So much so that on the morning when he was to draw the cash for the cheque, at the Credit Lyonnais, he had only fifty pounds and some odd silver left. Aristide looking at the remainder rather ruefully made a great resolution. He would gamble no more. Already he was richer than he had ever been in his life. He would leave Aix. Tiens! why should he not go to his good friends the Bocardons at Nimes, bringing with him a gold chain for Bocardon and a pair of ear-rings for the adorable Zette? There he would look about him. He would use the thousand pounds as a stepping-stone to legitimate fortune. Then he would visit the Erringtons in England, and if the beautiful Miss Betty smiled on him—why, after all, sacrebleu he was an honest man, without a feather on his conscience.

So, jauntily swinging his cane, he marched into the office of the Credit Lyonnais, went into the inner room and explained his business.

"Ah, your cheque, monsieur, that we were to collect. I am sorry. It has come back from the London bankers."

"How come back?"

"It has not been honoured. See, monsieur. 'Not known. No account.'" The cashier pointed to the grim words across the cheque.

"Comprends pas," faltered Aristide.

"It means that the person who gave you the cheque has no account at this bank."

Aristide took the cheque and looked at it in a dazed way.

"Then I do not get my twenty-five thousand francs?"

"Evidently not," said the cashier.

Aristide stood for a while stunned. What did it mean? His thousand pounds could not be lost. It was impossible. There was some mistake. It was an evil dream. With a heavy weight on the top of his head, he went out of the Credit Lyonnais and mechanically crossed the little street separating the Bank from the cafe on the Place Carnot. There he sat stupidly and wondered. The waiter hovered in front of him. "Monsieur desire?" Aristide waved him away absently. Yes, it was some mistake. Mrs. Errington in her agitation must have used the wrong cheque book. But even rich English people do not carry about with them a circulating library assortment of cheque books. It was incomprehensible—and meanwhile, his thousand pounds....

The little square blazed before him in the August sunshine. Opposite flashed the white mass of the Etablissement des Bains. There was the old Roman Arch of Titus, gray and venerable. There were the trees of the gardens in riotous greenery. There on the right marking the hour of eleven on its black face was the clock of the Comptoir National. It was Aix; familiar Aix; not a land of dreams. And there coming rapidly across from the Comptoir National was the well knit figure of the young man from Atlanta.

"Nom de Dieu," murmured Aristide. "Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!"

Eugene Miller, in a fine frenzy, threw himself into a chair beside Aristide.

"See here. Can you understand this?"

He thrust into his hand a pink strip of paper. It was a cheque for a hundred pounds, made payable to Eugene Miller, Esquire, signed by Mary Errington, and marked "Not known. No account."

"Tonnerre de Dieu!" cried Aristide. "How did you get this?"

"How did I get it? I cashed it for her—the day she went away. She said urgent affairs summoned her from Aix—no time to wire for funds—wanted to pay her hotel bill—and she gave me the address of her old English home in Somerset and invited me to come there in September. Fifteenth of September. Said that you were coming. And now I've got a bum cheque. I guess I can't wander about this country alone. I need blinkers and harness and a man with a whip."

He went on indignantly. Aristide composed his face into an expression of parental interest; but within him there was shivering and sickening upheaval. He saw it all, the whole mocking drama....

He, Aristide Pujol, was the most sweetly, the most completely swindled man in France.

The Comte de Lussigny, the mild Mrs. Errington and the beautiful Betty were in league together and had exquisitely plotted. They had conspired, as soon as he had accused the Count of cheating. The rascal must have gone straight to them from Miller's room. No wonder that Lussigny, when insulted at the tables, had sat like a tame rabbit and had sought him in the garden. No wonder he had accepted the accusation of adventurer. No wonder he had refused to play for the cheque which he knew to be valueless. But why, thought Aristide, did he not at once consent to sell the papers on the stipulation that he should be paid in notes? Aristide found an answer. He wanted to get everything for nothing, afraid of the use that Aristide might make of a damning confession, and also relying for success on his manipulation of the cards. Finally he had desired to get hold of a dangerous cheque. In that he had been foiled. But the trio has got away with his thousand pounds, his wonderful thousand pounds. He reflected, still keeping an attentive eye on young Eugene Miller and interjecting a sympathetic word, that after he had paid his hotel bill, he would be as poor on quitting Aix-les-Bains as he was when he had entered it. Sic transit.... As it was in the beginning with Aristide Pujol, is now and ever shall be....

"But I have my clothes—such clothes as I've never had in my life," thought Aristide. "And a diamond and sapphire tie-pin and a gold watch, and all sorts of other things. Tron de l'air, I'm still rich."

"Who would have thought she was like that?" said he. "And a hundred pounds, too. A lot of money."

For nothing in the world would he have confessed himself a fellow-victim.

"I don't care a cent for the hundred pounds," cried the young man. "Our factory turns out seven hundred and sixty-seven million pairs of boots per annum." (Aristide, not I, is responsible for the statistics.) "But I have a feeling that in this hoary country I'm just a little toddling child. And I hate it. I do, sir. I want a nurse to take me round."

Aristide flashed the lightning of his wit upon the young man from Atlanta, Georgia.

"You do, my dear young friend. I'll be your nurse, at a weekly salary—say a hundred francs—it doesn't matter. We will not quarrel." Eugene Miller was startled. "Yes," said Aristide, with a convincing flourish. "I'll clear robbers and sirens and harpies from your path. I'll show you things in Europe—from Tromsoe to Cap Spartivento that you never dreamed of. I'll lead you to every stained glass window in the world. I know them all."

"I particularly want to see those in the church of St. Sebald in Nuremberg."

"I know them like my pocket," said Aristide. "I will take you there. We start to-day."

"But, Mr. Pujol," said the somewhat bewildered Georgian. "I thought you were a man of fortune."

"I am more than a man. I am a soldier. I am a soldier of Fortune. The fickle goddess has for the moment deserted me. But I am loyal. I have for all worldly goods, two hundred and fifty dollars, with which I shall honorably pay my hotel bill. I say I am a soldier of Fortune. But," he slapped his chest, "I am the only honorable one on the Continent of Europe."

The young man fixed upon him the hard blue eyes, not of the enthusiast for stained glass windows, but of the senior partner in the boot factory of Atlanta, Georgia.

"I believe you," said he. "It's a deal. Shake."

"And now," said Aristide, after having shaken hands, "come and lunch with me at Nikola's for the last time."

He rose, stretched out both arms in a wide gesture and smiled with his irresistible Ancient Mariner's eyes at the young man.

"We lunch. We eat ambrosia. Then we go out together and see the wonderful world through the glass-blood of saints and martyrs and apostles and the good Father Abraham and Louis Quatorze. Viens, mon cher ami. It is the dream of my life."

Practically penniless and absolutely disillusioned, the amazing man was radiantly happy.



IX

THE ADVENTURE OF A SAINT MARTIN'S SUMMER

My good friend Blessington, who is a mighty man in the Bordeaux wine-trade, happening one day to lament the irreparable loss of a deceased employe, an Admirable Crichton of a myriad accomplishments and linguistic attainments whose functions it had been, apparently, to travel about between London, Bordeaux, Marseilles and Algiers, I immediately thought of a certain living and presumably unemployed paragon of my acquaintance.

"I know the very man you're looking for," said I.

"Who is he?"

"He's a kind of human firework," said I, "and his name is Aristide Pujol."

I sketched the man—in my desire to do a good turn to Aristide, perhaps in exaggerated colour.

"Let me have a look at him," said Blessington.

"He may be anywhere on the continent of Europe," said I. "How long can you give me to produce him?"

"A week. Not longer."

"I'll do my best," said I.

By good luck my telegram, sent off about four o'clock, found him at 213 bis Rue Saint-Honore. He had just returned to Paris after some mad dash for fortune (he told me afterwards a wild and disastrous story of a Russian Grand-Duke, a Dancer and a gold mine in the Dolomites) and had once more resumed the dreary conduct of the Agence Pujol at the Hotel du Soleil et de l'Ecosse. My summons being imperative, he abandoned the Agence Pujol as a cat jumps off a wall, and, leaving the guests of the Hotel guideless, to the indignation of Monsieur Bocardon, whom he had served this trick several times before, paid his good landlady, Madam Bidoux, what he owed her, took a third-class ticket to London, bought, lunatic that he was, a ripe Brie cheese, a foot in diameter, a present to myself, which he carried in his hand most of the journey, and turned up at my house at eight o'clock the next morning with absolutely empty pockets and the happiest and most fascinating smile that ever irradiated the face of man. As a matter of fact, he burst his way past my scandalized valet into my bedroom and woke me up.

"Here I am, my dear friend, and here is something French you love that I have brought you," and he thrust the Brie cheese under my nose.

"— — —," said I.

If you were awakened by a Brie cheese, an hour before your time, you would say the same. Aristide sat at the foot of the bed and laughed till the tears ran down his beard.

As soon as it was decent I sent him into the city to interview Blessington. Three hours afterward he returned more radiant than ever. He threw himself into my arms; before I could disentagle myself, he kissed me on both cheeks; then he danced about the room.

"Me voici," he said, "accredited representative of the great Maison Dulau et Compagnie. I have hundreds of pounds a year. I go about. I watch. I control. I see that the Great British Public can assuage its thirst with the pure juice of the grape and not with the dregs of a laboratory. I test vintages. I count barrels. I enter them in books. I smile at Algerian wine growers and say, 'Ha! ha! none of your petite piquette frelatee for me but good sound wine.' It is diplomacy. It is as simple as kissing hands. And I have a sustained income. Now I can be un bon bourgeois instead of a stray cat. And all due to you, mon cher ami. I am grateful—voyons—if anybody ever says Aristide Pujol is ungrateful, he is a liar. You believe me! Say you believe me."

He looked at me earnestly.

"I do, old chap," said I.

I had known Aristide for some years, and in all kinds of little ways he had continuously manifested his gratitude for the trifling service I had rendered him, at our first meeting, in delivering him out of the hands of the horrific Madam Gougasse. That gratitude is the expectation of favors to come was, in the case of Aristide, a cynical and inapplicable proposition. And here, as this (as far as I can see) is the last of Aristide's adventures I have to relate, let me make an honest and considered statement:—

During the course of an interesting and fairly prosperous life, I have made many delightful Bohemian, devil-may-care acquaintances, but among them all Aristide stands as the one bright star who has never asked me to lend him money. I have offered it times without number, but he has refused. I believe there is no man living to whom Aristide is in debt. In the depths of the man's changeling and feckless soul is a principle which has carried him untarnished through many a wild adventure. If he ever accepted money—money to the Provencal peasant is the transcendental materialised, and Aristide (save by the changeling theory) was Provencal peasant bone and blood—it was always for what he honestly thought was value received. If he met a man who wanted to take a mule ride among the Mountains of the Moon, Aristide would at once have offered himself as guide. The man would have paid him; but Aristide, by some quaint spiritual juggling, would have persuaded him that the ascent of Primrose Hill was equal to any lunar achievement, seeing that, himself, Aristide Pujol, was keeper of the Sun, Moon and Seven Stars; and the gift to that man of Aristide's dynamic personality would have been well worth anything that he would have found in the extinct volcano we know to be the moon.

"The only thing I would suggest, if you would allow me to do so," said I, "is not to try to make the fortune of Messrs. Dulau & Co. by some dazzling but devastating coup of your own."

He looked at me in his bright, shrewd way. "You think it time I restrained my imagination?"

"Exactly."

"I will read The Times and buy a family Bible," said Aristide.

A week after he had taken up his work in the City, under my friend Blessington, I saw the delighted and prosperous man again. It was a Saturday and he came to lunch at my house.

"Tiens!" said he, when he had recounted his success in the office, "it is four years since I was in England?"

"Yes," said I, with a jerk of memory. "Time passes quickly."

"It is three years since I lost little Jean."

"Who is little Jean?" I asked.

"Did I not tell you when I saw you last in Paris?"

"No."

"It is strange. I have been thinking about him and my heart has been aching for him all the time. You must hear. It is most important." He lit a cigar and began.

It was then that he told me the story of which I have already related in these chronicles:[A] how he was scouring France in a ramshackle automobile as the peripatetic vendor of a patent corn cure and found a babe of nine months lying abandoned in the middle of that silent road through the wilderness between Salon and Arles; how instead of delivering it over to the authorities, he adopted it and carried it about with him from town to town, a motor accessory sometimes embarrassing, but always divinely precious; how an evil day came upon him at Aix-en-Provence when, the wheezing automobile having uttered its last gasp, he found his occupation gone; how, no longer being able to care for le petit Jean, he left him with a letter and half his fortune outside the door of a couple of English maiden ladies who, staying in the same hotel, had manifested great interest in the baby and himself; and how, in the dead of the night, he had tramped away from Aix-en-Provence in the rain, his pockets light and his heart as heavy as lead.

[A] The Adventures of the Foundling.

"And I have never heard of my little Jean again," said Aristide.

"Why didn't you write?" I asked.

"I knew their names, Honeywood; Miss Janet was the elder, Miss Anne the younger. But the name of the place they lived at I have never been able to remember. It was near London—they used to come up by train to matinees and afternoon concerts. But what it is called, mon Dieu, I have racked my brain for it. Sacre mille tonnerres!" He leaped to his feet in his unexpected, startling way, and pounced on a Bradshaw's Railway Guide lying on my library table. "Imbecile, pig, triple ass that I am! Why did I not think of this before? It is near London. If I look through all the stations near London on every line, I shall find it."

"All right," said I, "go ahead."

I lit a cigarette and took up a novel. I had not read very far when a sudden uproar from the table caused me to turn round. Aristide danced and flourished the Bradshaw over his head.

"Chislehurst! Chislehurst! Ah, mon ami, now I am happy. Now I have found my little Jean. You will forgive me—but I must go now and embrace him."

He held out his hand.

"Where are you off to?" I demanded.

"The Chislehurst, where else?"

"My dear fellow," said I, rising, "do you seriously suppose that these two English maiden ladies have taken on themselves the responsibility of that foreign brat's upbringing?"

"Mon Dieu!" said he taken aback for the moment, hypothesis having entered his head. Then, with a wide gesture, he flung the preposterous idea to the winds. "Of course. They have hearts, these English women. They have maternal instincts. They have money." He looked at Bradshaw again, then at his watch. "I have just time to catch a train. Au revoir, mon vieux."

"But," I objected, "why don't you write? It's the natural thing to do."

"Write? Bah! Did you ever hear of a Provencal writing when he could talk?" He tapped his lips, and in an instant, like a whirlwind, he passed from my ken.

* * * * *

Aristide on his arrival at Chislehurst looked about the pleasant, leafy place—it was a bright October afternoon and the wooded hillside blazed in russet and gold—and decided it was the perfect environment for Miss Janet and Miss Anne, to say nothing of little Jean. A neat red brick house with a trim garden in front of it looked just the kind of a house wherein Miss Janet and Miss Anne would live. He rang the bell. A parlour-maid, in spotless black and white, tutelary nymph of Suburbia, the very parlour-maid who would minister to Miss Janet and Miss Anne, opened the door.

"Miss Honeywood?" he inquired.

"Not here, sir," said the parlour-maid.

"Where is she? I mean, where are they?"

"No one of that name lives here," said the parlour-maid.

"Who does live here?"

"Colonel Brabazon."

"And where do the two Miss Honeywood live?" he asked with his engaging smile.

But English suburban parlour-maids are on their guard against smiles, no matter how engaging. She prepared to shut the door.

"I don't know."

"How can I find out?"

"You might enquire among the tradespeople."

"Thank you, mademoiselle, you are a most intelligent young——"

The door shut in his face. Aristide frowned. She was a pretty parlour-maid, and Aristide didn't like to be so haughtily treated by a pretty woman. But his quest being little Jean and not the eternal feminine, he took the maid's advice and made enquiries at the prim and respectable shops.

"Oh, yes," said a comely young woman in a fragrant bakers' and confectioners'. "They were two ladies, weren't they? They lived at Hope Cottage. We used to supply them. They left Chislehurst two years ago."

"Sacre nom d'un chien!" said Aristide.

"Beg pardon?" asked the young woman.

"I am disappointed," said Aristide. "Where did they go to?"

"I'm sure I can't tell you."

"Do you remember whether they had a baby?"

"They were maiden ladies," said the young woman rebukingly.

"But anybody can keep a baby without being its father or mother. I want to know what has become of the baby."

The young woman gazed through the window.

"You had better ask the policeman."

"That's an idea," said Aristide, and, leaving her, he caught up the passing constable.

The constable knew nothing of maiden ladies with a baby, but he directed him to Hope Cottage. He found a pretty half-timber house lying back from the road, with a neat semi-circular gravelled path leading to a porch covered thick with Virginia creeper. Even more than the red brick residence of Colonel Brabazon did it look, with its air of dainty comfort, the fitting abode of Miss Janet and Miss Anne. He rang the bell and interviewed another trim parlour-maid. More susceptible to smiles than the former, she summoned her master, a kindly, middle-aged man, who came out into the porch. Yes, Honeywood was the name of the previous tenants. Two ladies, he believed. He had never seen them and knew nothing about a child. Messrs. Tompkin & Briggs, the estate agents in the High Street, could no doubt give him information. Aristide thanked him and made his way to Messrs. Tompkin & Briggs. A dreary spectacled youth in resentful charge of the office—his principals, it being Saturday afternoon, were golfing the happy hours away—professed blank ignorance of everything. Aristide fixed him with his glittering eye and flickered his fingers and spoke richly. The youth in a kind of mesmeric trance took down a battered, dog's eared book and turned over the pages.

"Honeywood—Miss—Beverly Stoke—near St. Albans—Herts. That's it," he said.

Aristide made a note of the address. "Is that all you can tell me?"

"Yes," said the youth.

"I thank you very much, my young friend," said Aristide, raising his hat, "and here is something to buy a smile with," and, leaving a sixpence on the table to shimmer before the youth's stupefied eyes, Aristide strutted out of the office.

* * * * *

"You had much better have written," said I, when he came back and told me of his experiences. "The post-office would have done all that for you."

"You have no idea of business, mon cher ami"—(I—a successful tea-broker of twenty-five years' standing!—the impudence of the fellow!)—"If I had written to-day, the letter would have reached Chislehurst on Monday morning. It would be redirected and reach Hertfordshire on Tuesday. I should not get any news till Wednesday. I go down to Beverly Stoke to-morrow, and then I find at once Miss Janet and Miss Anne and my little Jean! The secret of business men, and I am a business man, the accredited representative of Dulau et Compagnie—never forget that—the secret of business is no delay."

He darted across the room to Bradshaw.

"For God's sake," said I, "put that nightmare of perpetual motion in your pocket and go mad over it in the privacy of your own chamber."

"Very good," said he, tucking the brain-convulsing volume under his arm. "I will put it on top of The Times and the family Bible and I will say 'Ha! now I am British. Now I am very respectable!' What else can I do?"

"Rent a pew in a Baptist chapel," said I.

* * * * *

After a three-mile trudge from St. Albans Aristide, following directions, found himself on a high road running through the middle of a straggy common decked here and there with great elms splendid in autumn bravery, and populated chiefly by geese, who when he halted in some perplexity—for on each side, beyond the green, were indications of a human settlement—advanced in waddling flocks towards him and signified their disapproval of his presence. A Sundayfied youth in a rainbow tie rode past on a bicycle. Aristide took off his hat. The youth nearly fell off the bicycle, but British doggedness saved him from disaster.

"Beverly Stoke? Will you have the courtesy——"

"Here," bawled the youth, with a circular twist of his head, and, eager to escape from a madman, he rode on furiously.

Aristide looked to left and right at the little houses beyond the green—some white and thatched and dilapidated, others horridly new and perky—but all poor and insignificant. As his eyes became accustomed to the scene they were aware of human forms dotted sparsely about the common. He struck across and accosted one, an elderly woman with a prayer-book. "Miss Honeywood? A lady from London?"

"That house over there—the third beyond the poplar."

"And little Jean—a beautiful child about four years old?"

"That I don't know, sir. I live at Wilmer's End, a good half mile from here."

Aristide made for the third house past the poplar. First there was a plank bridge across a grass-grown ditch; then a tiny patch of garden; then a humble whitewashed cottage with a small leaded casement window on each side of the front door. Unlike Hope Cottage, it did not look at all the residence of Miss Janet and Miss Anne. Its appearance, indeed, was woe-begone. Aristide, however, went up to the door; as there was neither knocker nor bell, he rapped with his knuckles. The door opened, and there, poorly dressed in blouse and skirt, stood Miss Anne.

She regarded him for a moment in a bewildered way, then, recognizing him, drew back into the stone flagged passage with a sharp cry.

"You? You—Mr. Pujol?"

"Oui, Mademoiselle, c'est moi. It is I, Aristide Pujol."

She put her hands on her bosom. "It is rather a shock seeing you—so unexpectedly. Will you come in?"

She led the way into a tiny parlour, very clean, very simple with its furniture of old oak and brass, and bade him sit. She looked a little older than when he had seen her at Aix-en-Provence. A few lines had marred the comely face and there was here and there a touch of grey in the reddish hair, and, though still buxom, she had grown thinner. Care had set its stamp upon her.

"Miss Honeywood," said Aristide. "It is on account of little Jean that I have come——"

She turned on him swiftly. "Not to take him away!"

"Then he is here!" He jumped to his feet and wrung both her hands and kissed them to her great embarrassment. "Ah, mademoiselle, I knew it. I felt it. When such an inspiration comes to a man, it is the bon Dieu who sends it. He is here, actually here, in this house?"

"Yes," said Miss Anne.

Aristide threw out his arms. "Let me see him. Ah, le cher petit! I have been yearning after him for three years. It was my heart that I ripped out of my body that night and laid at your threshold."

"Hush!" said Miss Anne, with an interrupting gesture. "You must not talk so loud. He is asleep in the next room. You mustn't wake him. He is very ill."

"Ill? Dangerously ill?"

"I'm afraid so."

"Mon Dieu," said he, sitting down again in the oak settle. To Aristide the emotion of the moment was absorbing, overwhelming. His attitude betokened deepest misery and dejection.

"And I expected to see him full of joy and health!"

"It is not my fault, Mr. Pujol," said Miss Anne.

He started. "But no. How could it be? You loved him when you first set eyes on him at Aix-en-Provence."

Miss Anne began to cry. "God knows," said she, "what I should do without him. The dear mite is all that is left to me."

"All? But there is your sister, the dear Miss Janet."

Miss Anne's eyes were hidden in her handkerchief. "My poor sister died last year, Mr. Pujol."

"I am very sorry. I did not know," said Aristide gently.

There was a short silence. "It was a great sorrow to you," he said.

"It was God's will," said Anne. Then, after another pause, during which she dried her eyes, she strove to smile. "Tell me about yourself. How do you come to be here?"

Aristide replied in a hesitating way. He was in the presence of grief and sickness and trouble; the Provencal braggadocio dropped from him and he became the simple and childish creature that he was. He accounted very truthfully, very convincingly, for his queer life; for his abandonment of little Jean, for his silence, for his sudden and unexpected appearance. During the ingenuous apologia pro vita sua Miss Anne regarded him with her honest candour.

"Janet and I both understood," she said. "Janet was gifted with a divine comprehension and pity. The landlady at the hotel, I remember, said some unkind things about you; but we didn't believe them. We felt that you were a good man—no one but a good man could have written that letter—we cried over it—and when she tried to poison our minds we said to each other: 'What does it matter? Here God in his mercy has given us a child.' But, Mr. Pujol, why didn't you take us into your confidence?"

"My dear Miss Anne," said Aristide, "we of the South do things impulsively, by lightning flashes. An idea comes suddenly. Vlan! we carry it out in two seconds. We are not less human than the Northerner, who reflects two months."

"That is almost what dear, wise Janet told me," said Miss Anne.

"Then you know in your heart," said Aristide, after a while, "that if I had not been only a football at the feet of fortune, I should never have deserted little Jean?"

"I do, Mr. Pujol. My sister and I have been footballs, too." She added with a change of tone: "You tell me you saw our dear home at Chislehurst?"

"Yes," said Aristide.

"And you see this. There is a difference."

"What has happened?" asked Aristide.

She told him the commonplace pathetic story. Their father had left them shares in the company of which he had been managing director. For many years they had enjoyed a comfortable income. Then the company had become bankrupt and only a miserable ninety pounds a year had been saved from the wreckage. The cottage at Beverly Stoke belonging to them—it had been their mother's—they had migrated thither with their fallen fortunes and little Jean. And then Janet had died. She was delicate and unaccustomed to privation and discomfort—and the cottage had its disadvantages. She, Anne herself, was as strong as a horse and had never been ill in her life, but others were not quite so hardy. "However"—she smiled—"one has to make the best of things."