ng lady. It was a Russe. The concierge smiled to himself at
Ostrander's flushed cheek. It served this one-armed, conceited American
poseur right. Mademoiselle was wiser in this SECOND affair.

Ostrander did not finish his picture. The princess sent him a cheque,
which he coldly returned. Nevertheless he had acquired through his
Russian patronage a local fame which stood him well with the picture
dealers,--in spite of the excitement of the war. But his heart was no
longer in his work; a fever of unrest seized him, which at another time
might have wasted itself in mere dissipation. Some of his fellow artists
had already gone into the army. After the first great reverses he
offered his one arm and his military experience to that Paris which
had given him a home. The old fighting instinct returned to him with a
certain desperation he had never known before. In the sorties from
Paris the one-armed American became famous, until a few days before the
capitulation, when he was struck down by a bullet through the lung, and
left in a temporary hospital. Here in the whirl and terror of Commune
days he was forgotten, and when Paris revived under the republic he had
disappeared as completely as his compatriot Helen.

But Miss Helen Maynard had been only obscured and not extinguished. At
the first outbreak of hostilities a few Americans had still kept giddy
state among the ruins of the tottering empire. A day or two after she
left the Rue de Frivole she was invited by one of her wealthy former
schoolmates to assist with her voice and talent at one of their
extravagant entertainments. "You will understand, dear," said Miss de
Laine, with ingenious delicacy, as she eyed her old comrade's well-worn
dress, "that Poppa expects to pay you professional prices, and it may be
an opening for you among our other friends."

"I should not come otherwise, dear," said Miss Helen with equal
frankness. But she played and sang very charmingly to the fashionable
assembly in the Champs Elysees,--so charmingly, indeed, that Miss de
Laine patronizingly expatiated upon her worth and her better days in
confidence to some of the guests.

"A most deserving creature," said Miss de Laine to the dowager duchess
of Soho, who was passing through Paris on her way to England; "you would
hardly believe that Poppa knew her father when he was one of the richest
men in South Carolina."

"Your father seems to have been very fortunate," said the duchess
quietly, "and