shall hope to bring it out in September."

I sat there at peace with all the world. Howard was entirely forgiven
now; my father's treatment forgotten. Let the past go. What did
anything matter? And I tapped my stick on the flooring at the end of
the songs I had barely heard, out of sheer good humour, and swallowed
the second-rate brandy and smoked an infamous cigar with imperturbable
complacence; and as I got up with the mass at the finale I heard my
nearest neighbour's remark to his companion, which might be freely
translated thus:

"How jolly these pigs of English always look!"

As I was leaving, a woman ran down the gravel walk after me, and
slipped her arm through mine. I turned and paused. She was very small,
pretty, and Parisian from her black eyebrows, cocked like one of her
own circumflex accents, to her patent shoes under her silk skirt.

"What do you want" I said, in her own tongue, of course. "Money?"

"We don't put it like that!" she said, thrusting out her red lips.

"Well, it comes to that in the end generally," I said, whirling my cane
round in my hand and smiling." It will save you trouble if you take it
now," and I offered her two five-franc pieces and withdrew my arm. "Go
to the bar and drink my health with it!" She took the money, but still
looked at me.

"Give me a kiss!" she said in a low tone, so low that I did not catch
the last word.

"Give you what" I asked.

She stamped her foot.

"Un baiser!" she said, with a little French scream. "Embrasse moi!
Stupide!"

I laughed slightly as I looked down upon her. It seemed so ludicrous,
the proposition, just then to me. I had hardly lived the life I had in
Paris for the last thirty months, to now, in the moment of success and
freedom, mar its remembrance by even so much as a chance kiss to a cafe
chantant girl.

For a second we looked at each other. I noted the tint and the curl of
the offered lips, damp with cosmetic, and suggestive of past kisses,
and the untouched lips of Lucia seemed almost against my own as I
looked. Then I loosened her hand, which clung to my sleeve, and turned
from her, and went on down the path. She shrieked some vile French
words after me, and sent the five-franc piece rolling after me down the
gravel slope.

I laughed and shrugged my shoulders without looking back, and went on
out of the gardens down into the now silent streets. What a flood of
good spirits poured through my frame as I passed on! I hardly seemed