Senora," he said, "you
should know; you have the key to him."

Gone was all the discipline to which her nature had deferred. Twenty
years of quiet and atonement were stripped from her like a flimsy
garment. The fire was alight in all her vivid face again as she
brooded upon his answer.

"Ah!" she cried of a sudden. "Everything is stale for a stale soul.
Does he count on that? Senor, you speak well; you have made me a
picture of him. He has heard that I have made religion the pillow of
my conscience, eh? He folds his hands, eh?--thin, waxen hands,
clasping in piety upon his counterpane, eh? He will wear the air of a
thin saint and bless me in a beautiful voice? Am I right? Am I
right?"

She forced her questions into his face, leaning forward in a quick
violence.

"Goodness knows!" said O'Neill. "I shouldn't wonder."

She nodded at him with tight lips. "I know," she said. "I know. I
have him by heart." She rose from her seat and stood thinking.
Suddenly she laughed, and strode to the middle of the room. Her gait
had the impatience and lightness of a dancer's. Quickly she wheeled
and faced O'Neill, laughing again.

"Now, by his salvation and mine," she cried, "I will do what he asks.
I will go to him. He thinks his heart is dry to me. I will show him!
I will show him!" She opened her arms with a sweep. "Tell me," she
cried, "am I old? Am I the nun you looked for?" Her voice pealed
scornfully. "Scarlet," she said; "I will go to him in scarlet, as he
pictured me when I posed for 'The Dancer!' His pulses shall welcome
me; his soul was in its grave when I was in my cradle."

O'Neill had risen too. "Senora," he protested, "you must consider--
he is a dying man!"

He spoke to her back. Laughing again, she had turned from him to the
gilt shrine and plucked a flower from it. She was fixing it in her
hair when she faced him.

"To-night," she said, "we travel north. You are"--she paused,
smiling--"you are my impresario, and Lola--Lola makes her curtsy
again!"

She caught her black skirt in her hand and curtsied to him with an
extravagant grace.

That was a strange journey to Paris that O'Neill made with the
Senora. He had seen her humor change swiftly in response to his
appeal; what was surprising was that that new humor should maintain
its nervous height. It was soon enough apparent that the Lola of
twenty years before lived yet, her flamboyant energy, her unstable
caprice, her full-blooded force conserved and undi