said in English. "Is it worth it, Howard? You
may regret it. She is probably some married woman!"

Howard wrenched himself free from me.

"Don't talk to me! I'm not the fellow to refuse a jolly good lark when
it's offered to me!"

He flung himself into the brougham without another word, drew the door
to after him, and they were gone, whirling up the Champs Elysees,
leaving me standing on the kerb looking after the polished black back
of the brougham receding and growing small in the distance.

"Well!" I thought, "if another fellow had told me this tale, I should
have thought it a howler!"

The suddenness of the whole thing had taken my breath away, and I must
have stood there many seconds in confused thought, in which a flexible
form and arched foot took a prominent part.

When I roused myself I saw Nous was lying down beside me with the
patience of a philosopher, and catching the flies that buzzed along the
sunny pavement--to kill time.

I called him, and went on up toward the Arc.

"I couldn't have done otherwise," I thought. I knew I did not wish to
have done otherwise. I knew I should say again exactly the same if the
brougham were again before me, but yet--

"I want nothing now that I have my work on hand," I told myself, as the
arched foot went on before me up the pavement.

"By-and-by"--but then life seemed all by-and-bys for me.

I shortened my walk. Everything seemed to jar upon my nerves. I went
back to the hotel by a quiet way, and then up to the empty room to work.

Howard did not return for a couple of days. On the third I was sitting
after dinner at one of the tables outside the hotel cafe, smoking,
under the line of trees that edge the Paris kerb, when a fiacre drew up
at my very elbow, and Howard got out. He did not see me for a minute,
engaged with paying the cocher and hunting for a pourboire, and then he
was just going straight across the lighted trottoir into the hotel when
I called to him.

"Hullo, Vic! there you are!" he said, turning back. "I didn't see you
under the tree."

He came back and drew up a chair, with a scraping sound, to the
opposite side of my table, leant his elbows upon it, and pushed his hat
back. There was a blaze of light, all across the pavement to where we
were sitting, from the windows and open glass doors of the cafe. He
looked well and uncommonly jolly; a man who lives his life, such as it
is, without thought, without reflection, and without philosophy--who