aged virtue which could not have deceived the most childlike of
moralists for a moment--and greatly amused his audience.

It became a recognized entertainment to go and hear his abuse of Heyst,
while sipping iced drinks on the veranda of the hotel. It was, in a
manner, a more successful draw than the Zangiacomo concerts had ever
been--intervals and all. There was never any difficulty in starting the
performer off. Anybody could do it, by almost any distant allusion.
As likely as not he would start his endless denunciations in the very
billiard-room where Mrs. Schomberg sat enthroned as usual, swallowing
her sobs, concealing her tortures of abject humiliation and terror under
her stupid, set, everlasting grin, which, having been provided for her
by nature, was an excellent mask, in as much as nothing--not even death
itself, perhaps--could tear it away.

But nothing lasts in this world, at least without changing its
physiognomy. So, after a few weeks, Schomberg regained his outward calm,
as if his indignation had dried up within him. And it was time. He was
becoming a bore with his inability to talk of anything else but Heyst's
unfitness to be at large, Heyst's wickedness, his wiles, his astuteness,
and his criminality. Schomberg no longer pretended to despise him. He
could not have done it. After what had happened he could not pretend,
even to himself. But his bottled-up indignation was fermenting
venomously. At the time of his immoderate loquacity one of his
customers, an elderly man, had remarked one evening:

"If that ass keeps on like this, he will end by going crazy."

And this belief was less than half wrong. Schomberg had Heyst on the
brain. Even the unsatisfactory state of his affairs, which had
never been so unpromising since he came out East directly after the
Franco-Prussian War, he referred to some subtly noxious influence of
Heyst. It seemed to him that he could never be himself again till he had
got even with that artful Swede. He was ready to swear that Heyst had
ruined his life. The girl so unfairly, craftily, basely decoyed away
would have inspired him to success in a new start. Obviously Mrs.
Schomberg, whom he terrified by savagely silent moods combined with
underhand, poisoned glances, could give him no inspiration. He had grown
generally neglectful, but with a partiality for reckless expedients, as
if he did not care when and how his career as a hotel-keeper was to be
brought to an end. This demor