country squires
has ever succeeded in producing."

"Don't talk rot," she said, with foolishness in her eyes.

She accompanied me bareheaded in the sunshine to the gate of my hotel.

"Come and dine with me, if you're well enough," she said as we parted.

I assented, and when the evening came I went. Did I not say that we were
like two lost souls wandering alone in the mist?

It was only when I rose to bid her good-night that she referred to Dale.

"I wrote to him this afternoon," she announced curtly.

"You said you would do so."

"Would you like to know what I told him?"

She put her hands behind her back and stood facing me, somewhat
defiantly, in all her magnificence. I smiled. Women, much as they scoff
at the blindness of our sex, are often transparent.

"It's your firm determination to tell me," said I. "Well?"

She advanced a step nearer to me, and looked me straight in the eyes
defiantly.

"I told him that I loved you with all my heart and all my soul. I told
him that you didn't know it; that you didn't care a brass curse for me;
that you had acted as you thought best for the happiness of himself and
me. I told him that while you lived I could not think of another man.
I told him that if you could face Death with a smile on your face, he
might very well show the same courage and not chuck things right and
left just because a common woman wouldn't marry him or live with him and
spoil his career. There! That's what I told him. What do you think?"

"Heaven knows what effect it will have," said I, wearily, for I was
very, very tired. "But why, my poor Lola, have you wasted your love on a
shadow like me?"

She answered after the foolish way of women.

I have not heard from either Dale or Lady Kynnersley. A day or two ago,
in reply to a telegram to Raggles, I learned that Dale had lost the
election.

This, then, is the end of my _apologia pro vita mea_, which I began with
so resonant a flourish of vainglory. I have said all that there is to be
said. Nothing more has happened or is likely to happen until they put me
under the earth. Oh, yes, I was forgetting. In spite of my Monte Cristo
munificence, poor Latimer has been hammered on the Stock Exchange. Poor
Lucy and the kids!

I shall have, I think, just enough strength left to reach Mentone--this
place is intolerable now--and there I shall put myself under the care of
a capable physician who, with his abominable drugs, will doubtless begin
the