l, as you perceive."

If not beautiful, the poet was certainly true.

"What happened at the entree?"

"Oh, long before that we were pressing our feet under the table."

"And the coffee--"

"Mon Dieu! we were Tristram and Yseult, we were all the great lovers in
the Pantheon of love."

"And what then?"

"Oh, we went to the Cafe d'Harcourt--mon ami."

"Did she wear a veil?" I asked.

"Oui, certainement!"

"And did you say, 'Why do you wear a veil,--setting a black cloud
before the eyes and gates of heaven'?"

"The very words," said the Frenchman.

"And did she say, 'Yes, but the veil can be raised?'"

"She did, mon pauvre ami," said the poet.

"And did you raise it?"

"I did," said the poet.

"And so did I," I answered. And as I spoke, there was a crash of white
marble in my soul, and lo! Love had fallen from his pedestal and been
broken into a thousand pieces,--a heavy, dead thing he lay upon the
threshold of my heart.

We had appointed a secret meeting in the salon of the pension that
afternoon. I was not there! (Nor, as I afterwards learnt, was
Semiramis.) When we did meet, I was brutally cold. I evaded all her
moves; but when at last I decided to give her a hearing, I confess it
needed all my cynicism to resist her air of innocence, of pathetic
devotion.

If I couldn't love her, she said, might she go on loving me? Might she
write to me sometimes? She would be content if now and again I would
send her a little word. Perhaps in time I would grow to believe in her
love, etc.

The heart-broken abandonment with which she said this was a sore trial
to me; but though love may be deceived, vanity is ever vigilant, and
vanity saved me. Yet I left her with an aching sense of having been a
brute, and on the morning of my departure from Paris, as I said
good-bye to William and Dora, I spoke somewhat seriously of Semiramis.
Dora, Dora-like, had believed in her all along,--not having enjoyed
William's opportunities of studying her,--and she reproached me with
being rather hard-hearted.

"Nonsense," said William, "if she really cared, wouldn't she have been
up to bid you good-bye?"

The words were hardly gone from his lips when there came a little knock
at the door. It was Semiramis; she had come to say good-bye. Was it in
nature not to be touched? "Good-bye," she said, as we stood a moment
alone in the hall. "I shall always think of you; you shall not be to
me as a ship that has passed in the