is to be loved. For once--may I?"

Glancing up whimsically, almost like a child, he lifted his napkin
toward his collar.

"I may! Madame, you are an angel. You are a flock of angels. Why, I said
to them, should I leave this beautiful city to throw myself into the
arms of a mad librettist, who desires my blood simply because he cannot
write? Must genius die because an idiot has practised on bottles with a
revolver? It shall not be!"

"Do you mean Monsieur Gillier? Then they are going to Constantine!" said
Charmian sharply.

"To Constantine, Tunis, Batna, Biskra, the Sahara--_que sais-je_?
Adelaide is like a cat enraged! She cannot rest! And she has seduced my
Henriette."

He seemed perfectly contented, ate an excellent dinner, stayed till very
late in the night, talked, joked, and finally, sitting down at the
piano, played and sang. He was by turns a farceur, a wit, a man of
emotion, a man with a touch of genius. And in everything he said and did
he was almost preposterously unreserved. He seemed to be child, monkey
and artist in combination. It was inconceivable that he could ever feel
embarrassed or self-conscious.

At first, after his unexpected entry, Charmian had been almost painfully
preoccupied. Sennier, without apparently noticing this, broke her
preoccupation down. He was an egoist, but a singularly amusing and even
attractive one, throwing open every door, and begging you to admire and
delight in every room. Charmian began to study him, this man of a great
success. How different he was from Claude. Now that she was with Sennier
she was more sharply aware of Claude's reserve than she had ever been
before, of a certain rigidity which underlay all the apparent social
readiness.

When Sennier sang, in a voice that scarcely existed but that charmed,
she was really entranced. When he played after midnight she was excited,
intensely excited.

It was past one o'clock when he left reluctantly, promising to return on
the morrow, to take all his meals at Djenan-el-Maqui, to live there,
except for the very few hours claimed by sleep, till the "cat enraged"
and his wife returned. Charmian helped him to put on his coat. He
resigned himself to her hands like a child. Standing quite still, he
permitted her to button the coat. He left, singing an air from an opera
he was composing, arm in arm with Pierre, who was to escort him to his
hotel.

"I dare not go alone!" he exclaimed. "I am afraid of the Arabs! The
Arabs