e your road softer in
future."

She did not understand half his words; but as with an almost womanly
tenderness he placed a silken cushion beneath her head, she nestled
down, smiling into his eyes with the gratitude of a child that neither
questions nor doubts. To her he appeared like a being from another
world--a world or which she had scarcely dared to dream, and her eyes
were eloquent.

Adrien Leroy stood for a little while watching her, till her gentle
breathing showed him she had fallen asleep.

"A beautiful child," he said under his breath. "She will be a still more
beautiful woman." He sighed. "Poor little thing! Rich and poor, young
and old, how soon the world's poison reaches us!" Then, throwing a
tiger-skin over the slender body, he turned out the lights and left the
room. Summoning Norgate, he gave instructions that his nocturnal visitor
should not be disturbed in the morning by the housekeeper, but should be
allowed to sleep on. Then he made his way to his own room, not long
before the dawn broke.

He had befriended this young human thing as he would have rescued a
wounded bird, and with as little thought for the consequences; yet the
day was to come when he should look back on this action as one inspired,
in very truth, by his guardian angel.

CHAPTER IV

The sun had risen cold and bright when Adrien Leroy awoke, and his first
question was for the child, Jessica. But here a surprise awaited him,
for the bird had flown. Norgate and the housekeeper had found the room
tenantless. For some inexplicable reasons of her own she must have
stolen noiselessly out while the other occupants of the flat were still
sleeping.

Adrien made no comment, but proceeded to undergo the labours of the
toilet. A cold bath is an excellent tonic; and when Leroy entered the
dining-room his calm face bore no traces of his comparatively sleepless
night. He sat down to breakfast, waited on by the attentive Norgate, and
turned over the heap of letters which lay beside his plate. During his
leisured meal he opened them. They were principally invitations, though
a few of them were bills--big sums, many of them, for horses,
dinner-parties, supper-parties, jewellery, flowers--all the
hundred-and-one trifles which were as necessary to a man in his position
as light and air.

With a gesture of weariness, he pushed the pile from him, and throwing
them carelessly into the drawer of a buhl cabinet,