, an air with a
captivating suggestion of slyness and furtive joyousness running through
it.

He rose and walked across to the window, opening it a little wider. He
listened till the last notes had died away.

"What is that tune they have just played?" he asked.

"You'll hear it often enough," said the doctor. "A Frenchman writing in
the Matin the other day called it the 'National Anthem of the fait
accompli.'"

CHAPTER IV: "ES IST VERBOTEN"

Yeovil wakened next morning to the pleasant sensation of being in a
household where elaborate machinery for the smooth achievement of one's
daily life was noiselessly and unceasingly at work. Fever and the long
weariness of convalescence in indifferently comfortable surroundings had
given luxury a new value in his eyes. Money had not always been
plentiful with him in his younger days; in his twenty-eighth year he had
inherited a fairly substantial fortune, and he had married a wealthy
woman a few months later. It was characteristic of the man and his breed
that the chief use to which he had put his newly-acquired wealth had been
in seizing the opportunity which it gave him for indulging in unlimited
travel in wild, out-of-the-way regions, where the comforts of life were
meagrely represented. Cicely occasionally accompanied him to the
threshold of his expeditions, such as Cairo or St. Petersburg or
Constantinople, but her own tastes in the matter of roving were more or
less condensed within an area that comprised Cannes, Homburg, the
Scottish Highlands, and the Norwegian Fiords. Things outlandish and
barbaric appealed to her chiefly when presented under artistic but highly
civilised stage management on the boards of Covent Garden, and if she
wanted to look at wolves or sand grouse, she preferred doing so in the
company of an intelligent Fellow of the Zoological Society on some fine
Sunday afternoon in Regent's Park. It was one of the bonds of union and
good-fellowship between her husband and herself that each understood and
sympathised with the other's tastes without in the least wanting to share
them; they went their own ways and were pleased and comrade-like when the
ways happened to run together for a span, without self-reproach or heart-
searching when the ways diverged. Moreover, they had separate and
adequate banking accounts, which constitute, if not the keys of the
matrimonial Heaven, at least the oil that lubricates them.

Yeovil found Cicely and bre