a minute to
find it on the floor. O'Neill smashed a couple, and thrust his hand
into the waxen face--and waited. Buscarlet was breathing like a man
in a nightmare. Truelove stood to attention. But Regnault did not
return to the shape of life.

O'Neill let his hand drop, and turned to Truelove. "He's got it," he
said; "But fetch a doctor."

His eyes fell on the dancer in her shimmering scarlet, where she
knelt at the bedside, with her head bowed to the counterpane and her
hands clasped over it.

He sighed. He did not understand.

X

THE POOR IN HEART

It was his habit of an evening to play the flute; and he was playing
it faithfully, with the score propped up against a pile of books on
his table, when the noises from the street reached him, and
interrupted his music. With the silver-dotted flute in his hand he
moved to the window and put aside the curtains to look out.

The flute is the instrument of mild men; and Robert Lucas had
mildness for a chief quality. At the age of thirty-five, in the high
noon of his manhood, he showed to the world a friendly,
unenterprising face, neatly bearded, and generally a little vacant.
The accident that gave him a Russian mother was his main
qualification for the post he now held--that of representative of a
firm of leather manufacturers in the Russian town of Tambov. He spoke
Russian, he knew leather, and he could ignore the smells of a
tanyard; these facts entitled him to a livelihood.

To right and left, as he looked forth, the cobbled street was dark;
but opposite, in the silversmith's shop, there were lights, and,
below, a small crowd had gathered. He watched wonderingly. He knew
the silversmith well enough to nod as he passed his door--a young,
laborious man with a rapt, uncertain face and a tumbled mane of black
hair. There were also a little, grave wife and a fat, grave baby; and
these, when they were visible, received separate and distinctive
nods, and always returned them. The hide-sellers and tanners were,
for the most part, crude and sportive persons with whom he could have
nothing in common; they lived, apparently, on drink and uproar; and
he had come to regard the silversmith and his family as vague
friends. He pressed his face closer to the glass of the double
casement to see more certainly.

The little shop seemed to be full of lights and people, and outside
its door there was a press of folk. The murmur of voices was audible,
though he could distinguis