ce's maid had
any grounds for stating that a mishap to him would touch her mistress's
heart. He was a man of unbounded enterprise; but, like many who are
gamblers at heart, he was superstitious. He had never dared to try his
luck with Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence. She was so hard, so worldly, so
infinitely capable of managing her own affairs and regulating her own
life, that to offer her his hand and heart in exchange for her fortune
had hitherto been dismissed from his mind as a last expedient, only to
be faced when ruin awaited him.

She had only been a widow three years. She had never been a sentimental
woman, and now her liberty and her wealth were obviously so dear to her
that, in common sense, he could scarcely, with any prospect of success,
ask her outright to part with them. Moreover, Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence
knew all about Dormer Colville, as men say. Which is only a saying; for
no human being knows all about another human being, nor one-half,
nor one-tenth of what there is to know. Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence
knew enough, at all events, Colville reflected, rather ruefully, to
disillusionise a schoolgirl, much more a woman of the world, knowing
good and evil.

He had not lived forty years in the world, and twenty years in that
world of French culture which digs and digs into human nature, without
having heard philosophers opine that, in matters of the heart, women
have no illusions at all, and that it is only men who go blindfold into
the tortuous ways of love. But he was too practical a man to build up a
false hope on so frail a basis as a theory applied to a woman's heart.

He bought a flower for his buttonhole then, and squared his shoulders,
without any definite design. It was a mere habit--the habit acquired by
twenty years of unsuccessful enterprise, and renewed effort and deferred
hope--of leaving no stone unturned.

His cab wheeled into the Rue Lafayette, and the man drove more slowly,
reading the numbers on the houses. Then he stopped altogether, and
turned round in his seat.

"Citizen," he said, "there is a great crowd at the house you named. It
extends half across the street. I will go no further. It is not I who
care about publicity."

Colville stood up and looked in the direction indicated by his driver's
whip. The man had scarcely exaggerated. A number of people were waiting
their turn on the pavement and out into the roadway, while two gendarmes
held the door. Dormer Colville paid his cabman and