ent eyes. "How did you guess?"

"You yourself once detected echoes in me!"

We both laughed.

"That is what brought us together, Asticot. You seemed to regard him as
a god rather than as a man--and I loved you for it."

She put out her left hand. I touched it with my lips.

"That's a charming French way we haven't got in England. And--you did it
very nicely, Asticot."

I almost scowled at the servant who entered with the announcement that
tea was waiting in the drawing-room.

* * * * *

I think of all human utterances I have heard fall from the lips of those
I love and honour, that formula of Paragot's echoed by Joanna was the
most pathetically vain. And they believed it. Indeed it was the vital
article of their faith. On its truth the whole fabric of their love
depended.

It counted for nothing in Joanna's romantic eyes that the brilliant
eager youth, "rich in the glory of his rising-sun," who had won her
heart long ago--(she shewed me his photograph: alas poor Paragot!)--was
now the tongue-tied spectre, the tale of whose ungentle past was scarred
upon his face: who stalked grotesquely comfortless in his ill-fitting
clothes: who with the art of dress had lost in the boozing-kens of
Europe the graces of social intercourse. It counted for nothing that he
was middle-aged, deserted forever by the elusive wanton, inspiration,
condemned (she knew it in her heart) to artistic barrenness in
perpetuity. It counted for nothing that her gods awakened his contempt,
and his gods her fear. It counted for nothing that they had scarcely a
single taste or thought in common--half-educated, half-bred boy that I
was, I vow I entered a sweeter chamber of intimacy in my dear lady's
heart than was open to Paragot.

You see, in spite of all the deadening influences, all the horror of her
married life, she had remained a child. When the Comte de Verneuil had
found her unforgiving in the matter of the false announcement of
Paragot's death, he had left her pretty much to herself, and had gone
after the strange goddesses, the ignoble Astaroths, beloved by a man of
his type. Month had followed month and year had followed year, and she
had not developed. His family, nationalist and devout, of the old
school, regarded him, rightly, as a renegade from their traditions, and
regarded Joanna, wrongly, as the English heretic who had seduced him
from the paths of orthodoxy. Their relations with Joanna were of the