se up by the more pretentious bon-bon Casino. He was
to watch the antics of a band of actors toying with some mimic fate,
flippantly, to the sound of music, when his own destiny swung trembling
on the last silken thread of tortured suspense! Yet it was better than
moping alone, he told himself. He hated loneliness. And until the
last few weeks he had scarcely known the meaning of the word! There
had always been that other hand for which to reach, that other shoulder
on which to lean! And suddenly, at the sting of the memories that
surged over him, he went to the window that opened on its world of sea
and sunlight, and looked out. His hands clutched the sill, and his
unhappy eyes were intent and inquiring, as they swept the world before
him in a slow and comprehensive gaze.

"_Wherever you wait, wherever you are, in all this wide world, Frank,
come here, to me, now, now, for I want you, need you!_"

His lips scarcely murmured the vague invocation; it was more an
inarticulate wish phrasing itself somewhere in the background of his
clouded brain.

But as he awoke to the tumult of his emotions, to the intensity of his
attitude, whilst he stood there projecting that vague call out into
space, he turned abruptly away, with the abashment of a reticent man
detected in an act of theatricality, and flung out of the room, down
into the crowded streets of Monte Carlo.

CHAPTER II

THE AZURE COAST

As Durkin and the young Chicagoan once more stepped out of the
brilliantly lighted theatre, into the balmy night air, a seductive
mingling of perfumes and music and murmuring voices blew in their hot
faces, like a cooling wave. Durkin was wondering, a little wearily,
just when he could be alone again.

A group of gay and laughing women, with their aphrodisiac rustle of
silk and flutter of lace, floated carelessly past.

"Who are _they_?" asked the youth.

Durkin half-envied him his illusions and his ingenuousness of outlook;
he was treading a veritable amphitheatre of orderly disordered passions
with the gentle objective stare of a child looking for bright-colored
flowers on a battleground. Durkin wondered if, after all, it was not
the result of his mere quest of color, of his studying art in Paris for
a year or two.

"I wonder who and what they are?" impersonally reiterated the younger
man, as his gaze still followed the passing group to where it drifted
and scattered through the lamp-strewn garden, like a clu