ing scene was he about to witness? In a strange
confusion of ideas, the white face of the woman Lize sprang to his
imagination, coupled with the memory of the empty champagne bottle and
the battered tray of the first night at the Hotel Railleux. A deadly
sensitiveness oppressed him; he turned sharply to his guide.

"Madame! Madame! It is an altogether unreasonable hour to intrude--"

The reopening of the door on the right checked him, and a gentle voice
broke across his words:

"Now, madame, if you will!"

He turned, his heart still beating quickly, and a sudden shame at his
own thoughts--a sudden relief so strong as almost to be painful--surged
through him.

The open door revealed a woman of forty-five, perhaps of fifty, clothed
in a meagre black skirt and a plain linen wrapper of exquisite
cleanliness. It was this cleanliness that struck the note of her
personality--that fitted her as a garment, accentuating the quiet
austerity of her thin figure, the streaks of gray in her brown hair, the
pale face marked with suffering and sympathy and repression.

With an instinctive deference the boy bared his head.

"Madame," he stammered, "I apologize profoundly for my intrusion at such
an hour."

"Do not apologize, monsieur. Enter, if you will!" She drew back, smiling
a little, and making him welcome by a simple gesture. "We are anxious, I
assure you, to find a tenant for the _appartement_; my husband's health
is not what it was, and we find it necessary to move into the country."

He followed her into a tiny hall; and with her fingers on the handle of
an inner door, she looked at him again in her gentle, self-possessed
way.

"You will excuse my husband, monsieur! He is an invalid and cannot rise
from his chair."

She opened the inner door, and Max found himself in a bedroom, plain in
furniture and without adornment, but possessing a large window, the full
light from which was falling with pathetic vividness on the shrunken
figure and wan, expressionless face of a very old man who sat huddled in
a shabby leathern arm-chair. This arm-chair had been drawn to the
window to catch the wintry sun, and pathos unspeakable lay in the
contrasts of the picture--the eternal youth in the cold, dancing
beams--the waste, the frailty of human things in the inert figure, the
dim eyes, the folded, twitching hands.

The old man looked up as the little party entered, and his eyes sought
his wife's with a mute, appealing glance; then