idge-whist
and late dinners and incongruous dissipations, for a fortnight. Then
they fled to the huddled little hotels and _pensions_ of the narrow and
dark wooded valley of Karlsbad, under skies which Frank declared to be
bluer than the blue of forget-me-nots, where, amid Brahmins from India
and royalty from Austria and audacious young duchesses from Paris and
students from Petersburg and Berlin, and undecipherable strangers from
all the remotest corners of the globe, it seemed to Durkin they were at
last alone. He confided this feeling to his wife, one tranquil morning
after they had drunk their Sprudel from long-handled cups, at the
spring where the comely, rubber-garmented native girls caught and doled
out the biting hot spray of the geyser. They were seated at the
remoter end of the glass-covered Promenade, and a band was playing.
Something in the music, for once, had saddened and dispirited Frank.

"Alone?" she had retorted. "Who is ever alone?"

"Well, our wires are down, for a little while, anyway!" laughed Durkin,
as he sipped the hot salt water from the china cup. It reminded him,
he had said, of all his past sins in epitome. Frank sighed wearily,
and did not speak for a minute or two.

"But, after all," she said at last, in a meditative calmness of voice,
"there are always some sort of ghostly wires connecting us with one
another, holding us in touch with what we have been and done, with our
past, and with our ancestors, with all our forsaken sins and misdoings.
No, Jim, I don't believe we are _ever_ alone. There are always sounds
and hints, little broken messages and whispers, creeping in to us along
those hidden circuits. We call them Intuitions, and sometimes we speak
of them as Character, and sometimes as Heredity, and weakness of
will--but they are there, just the same!"

The confession of that mood was a costly one, for before the week was
out they had, in some way, wearied of the sight of that daily
procession of nephritics and neurotics, and were off again, like a pair
of homeless swallows, to the Rhine salmon and the Black Forest venison
of Baden. From there they fled to the mountain air of St. Moritz,
where they were frozen out and driven back to Paris--but always
spending freely and thinking little of the vague tomorrow. Durkin,
indeed, recognized that taint of improvidence in his veins. He was a
spendthrift; he had none of the temperamental foresight and frugality
of his wife, who r