lympe's engagement finally did come to an end, and
she departed. But her engagement had been highly beneficial to the
treasury-chest of the up-town theatre, and before Van Twiller could get
over missing her she had returned from a short Western tour, and her
immediate reappearance was underlined on the play-bills.

On a dead-wall opposite the windows of Van Twiller's sleeping-room there
appeared, as if by necromancy, an aggressive poster with Mademoiselle
Olympe Zabriski on it in letters at least a foot high. This thing stared
him in the face when he woke up, one morning. It gave him a sensation as
if she had called on him overnight, and left her card.

From time to time through the day he regarded that poster with a
sardonic eye. He had pitilessly resolved not to repeat the folly of the
previous month. To say that this moral victory cost him nothing would
be to deprive it of merit. It cost him many internal struggles. It is
a fine thing to see a man seizing his temptation by the throat, and
wrestling with it, and trampling it under foot like St. Anthony. This
was the spectacle Van Twiller was exhibiting to the angels.

The evening Mademoiselle Olympe was to make her reappearance, Van
Twiller, having dined at the club, and feeling more like himself than
he had felt for weeks, returned to his chamber, and, putting on
dressing-gown and slippers, piled up the greater portion of his library
about him, and fell to reading assiduously. There is nothing like a
quiet evening at home with some slight intellectual occupation, after
one's feathers have been stroked the wrong way.

When the lively French clock on the mantel-piece--a base of malachite
surmounted by a flying bronze Mercury with its arms spread gracefully on
the air, and not remotely suggestive of Mademoiselle Olympe in the
act of executing her grand flight from the trapeze--when the clock,
I repeat, struck nine, Van Twilier paid no attention to it. That was
certainly a triumph. I am anxious to render Van Twiller all the justice
I can, at this point of the narrative, inasmuch as when the half hour
sounded musically, like a crystal ball dropping into a silver bowl,
he rose from the chair automatically, thrust his feet into his
walking-shoes, threw his overcoat across his arm, and strode out of the
room.

To be weak and to scorn your weakness, and not to be able to conquer
it, is, as has been said, a hard thing; and I suspect it was not with
unalloyed satisfaction