spoke of him as if present beside her. A silence fell between us and
deepened.

The small, bullet-headed man had just paid his extravagant bill,
distributed his largesse, and was about to depart. He was being helped
into a sumptuous overcoat, with a deep collar of what I took to be
genuine Russian sables. There was nothing in his officiously tended
leave-taking to stir my interest; my eyes rested on him idly for a
moment, that was all. The head waiter, two under-waiters, and a solemn
little buttons followed him out to the stair-head, with every expression
of gratitude and esteem. Passing from sight, he passed from my thoughts,
leaving with me only a vague physical repulsion that barely outlasted
his departure.

"Do you know what I think Phil has done?" Susan was asking.

"Phil?" The name had startled me back to attention.

"I believe he's made himself one of them--the peasants, I mean--in some
remote, dirty, half-starved Russian village."

"Why? That's an odd fancy, dear. And it isn't much like him. Phil's too
clear-headed, or stiff-headed, for such mysticism."

"How little you really know him, then," she replied. "He's been steering
since birth, I feel, toward some great final renunciation. I believe
he's made it, now. You'll see, Ambo. Some day we'll hear of a new
prophet, away there in the East--where all our living dreams come from!
You'll see!"

"'In Vishnu-land what Avatar?'" I quoted, smiling sadly enough; and
Susan's smile wistfully echoed mine, even while she raised a warning
finger at me.

"Oh, you of little faith!" she said quite simply.

X

We had barely stepped out from the narrow doorway of the restaurant into
a tenuous, moon-saturated mist, a low-lying diaphaneity that left the
upper air-lanes openly clear, when the sirens were wailing again from
every quarter of the city....

"They're coming early to-night!" I exclaimed. "Well, that ends all hope
for a taxi home! We must find an _abri_."

"Nonsense! We'll walk quietly back along the river. Unless"--she teased
me--"you really _are_ afraid, Ambo?"

I tucked her arm firmly into mine. "So you won't stumble, _Mlle. la
Reformee_!"

"But it is a nuisance to be lame!" she protested: "I do envy you your
two good legs, _M. le Capitaine_."

We made our way slowly along the embankment, passing the Pont des Arts,
and two shadowy lovers paced on before us, blotted together, oblivious
of the long, eerie rise and fall of the sirens; every twenty y