t by the curtains of the bed canopy.

"Ah, how dull it must be for you! If we had some visitors?
Brantome----"

"No," she said.

"And yet it was through him----"

"What! haven't you seen through him yet?" she returned in a jealous
tone. And presently, with an accent of fear, as if her intuition had
discerned some serious, unrevealed event of which Brantome was going to
be the cause, "I wish we could have met some other place."

"You dislike him now?"

She responded:

"It was he, you know, who told me of that other woman, the one before
me, who had you when you were well."

She rose, laid a kiss upon his forehead, and went away to her rooms
across the corridor, leaving with him her perfume.

CHAPTER XXXIV

In New York there were two opinions concerning the change in Cornelius
Rysbroek.

From his travels, it seemed, he had acquired a certain temperamental as
well as physical hardness. He wore habitually a calm, ironical look,
as though, having found life out, he considered it a phenomenon worthy
only of scorn. He was seen everywhere, fastidiously attired,
self-possessed, taciturn, listening to the chatter of his friends with
sardonic attention, now and then throwing in a blighting comment. It
was curious that these infrequent remarks of his, even though they had
not remotely referred to her, always ended by bringing the conversation
round to Lilla. Thereupon he fell silent, smoked one cigarette after
another, and wore a look of indifference and boredom. At last he would
rise, apparently fatigued by all that trivial gossip, and wander away.

In solitude he became another man. He would pace the floor for hours,
sometimes all night; and then one might have heard some very peculiar
rigmaroles declaimed aloud, or even shouted out--phrases so jumbled
that they were hardly rational, cries interrupted by groans or
smothered by the grinding of his teeth. Now and then his valet, on
pushing back the window curtains in the morning, discovered a mirror
smashed, or a book torn to tatters. There was something shocking in
the calm set of Cornelius Rysbroek's jaws, the languid contempt of his
eyes, as he remarked to the valet, that "there had been a little
accident last night."

Once he burned his right hand severely. He had hurled a picture of
Lilla into the fire, then, to rescue it, had plunged his arm to the
elbow into the flames.

He often drove his car into Westchester County, round and round a wid