hos of his present position appealed to her
irresistibly. The possibilities of his life had been so great, fortune
had treated him always so strangely. The greatest of his schemes had
come so near to success, the luck had turned against him only at the
very moment of fruition. Helene felt very kindly towards her UNCLE as
she led him, after luncheon, to a quiet corner of the winter garden,
where a servant had already arranged a table with coffee and liqueurs
and cigarettes. Unscrupulous all his life, there had been an element of
greatness in all his schemes. Even his failures had been magnificent,
for his successes he himself had seldom reaped the reward. And now in
the autumn of his days she felt dimly that he was threatened with some
evil thing against which he stood at bay single-handed, likely perhaps
to be overpowered. For there was something in his face just now which
was strange to her.

"Helene," he said quietly, "I suppose that you, who knew nothing of
me till you left school, have looked upon me always as a selfish,
passionless creature--a weaver of plots, perhaps sometimes a dreamer of
dreams, but a person wholly self-centred, always self-engrossed?"

She shook her head.

"Not selfish!" she objected. "No, I never thought that. It is the wrong
word."

"At least," he said, "you will be surprised to hear that I have loved
one woman all my life."

She looked at him half doubtfully.

"Yes," she said, "I am surprised to hear that."

"I will surprise you still more. I was married to her in America within
a month of my arrival there. We have lived together ever since. And I
have been very happy. I speak, of course, of Lucille!"

"It is amazing," she murmured. "You must tell me all about it."

"Not all," he answered sadly. "Only this. I met her first at Vienna
when I was thirty-five, and she was eighteen. I treated her shamefully.
Marriage seemed to me, with all my dreams of great achievements, an act
of madness. I believed in myself and my career. I believed that it was
my destiny to restore the monarchy to our beloved country. And I wanted
to be free. I think that I saw myself a second Napoleon. So I won her
love, took all that she had to give, and returned nothing.

"In the course of years she married the son of the American Consul at
Vienna. I was obliged, by the bye, to fight her brother, and he carried
his enmity to me through life. I saw her sometimes in the course
of years. She was always beautiful,