atement, let her voice trail off into silence; Max,
folding--mechanically folding--the strands of hair, offered neither
disclaimer nor acceptance. With the force of the inevitable the
confession had struck home, and deep within him was the strong soul's
respect for the inevitable.

"You have always known?" he said, slowly, when the silence had fulfilled
itself. "You have always known--that I am a woman?"

It sounded abominably crude, abominably banal--this tardy question, and
never had Max felt less feminine than in the uttering of it.

The lips of Jacqueline quivered, her blue eyes brimmed with tears of
distress.

"Oh, I could wish myself dead!"

"And why?"

"Because I have made myself an imbecile!"

The humiliation, the self-contempt were so candid, so human, that
something changed in Max's face and the icy rigidity of pose relaxed.

"Come here!"

The guilty child to the life, Jacqueline came timidly across the room,
the candlestick still drooping unhappily from her right hand, the
mysterious mug clutched in her left.

Max's first action was to take possession of both, and to set them side
by side upon the dressing-table. The candle Jacqueline delivered up in
silence, but as the mug was wrested from her, she cried out in sudden
vindictiveness:

"And that--look you--that is the cause of all! It was Lucien's idea! I
served a cup of _bouillon_ to him and to his friend at midnight, for
they had talked much; and finding it good, nothing would serve but I
must place a cup also for Monsieur Max, to await him on his return.
Alas! Alas!"

Max pushed the cup away, as if to remove a side issue.

"Answer the question I put to you! You know that I am a woman?"

"Yes; I know."

"Since when? Since the night at the Bal Tabarin?"

"Oh, but no!"

"Since the morning we met upon this doorstep?"

"No."

"Since the morning you made the coffee for M. Blake and me?"

Jacqueline was twisting the buckle of her belt in nervous perturbation.

"Answer me! It was since that morning?"

"No! Yes! Oh, it was before that morning. Oh, madame--monsieur!" She
wrung her hands in a confusion of misery. "Oh, do not torture me! I
cannot tell you how it was--or when. I cannot explain. You know how
these things come--from here!" She lightly touched the place where she
imagined her heart to be.

Max, sitting quiet, made no betrayal of the agony of apprehension at
work within.

"And how many others have had this--instinct? M. Car