ou
more than any one else in the world."

"Even more than Mme. de Verneuil?" he asked with a smile.

I blushed. "She is different," said I.

"Quite different," he assented, after a long pause. "My son," he added,
"it is right that you should know why the end came. One generally keeps
these things to oneself--but I see you are blaming me, and a barrier may
grow up between us which we should both regret. You think I have treated
your dear lady most cruelly?"

"I can't judge you, Master," said I, terribly embarrassed.

"But you do," said he.

Paragot was in one of his rare gentle moods. He spoke softly, without a
trace of reproach or irony. He spoke, too, lying pipe in mouth on the
old rep sofa, instead of walking about the room. He told me his story.
Need I repeat it?

They had escaped a life-long misery, but on the other hand they had lost
a life-long dream. She was still in his eyes all that is beautiful and
exquisite in woman; but she was not the woman that Berzelius Nibbidard
Paragot could love. The twain had been romantic, walking in the Valley
of Illusion, wilfully blinding their eyes to the irony of Things Real.
Love had flown far from them during the silent years and they had
mistaken the afterglow of his wings for the living radiance. They had
begun to realise the desolate truth. They read it in each other's eyes.
She had been too loyal to speak. She would have married him, hoping as a
woman hopes, against hope. Paragot, whose soul revolted from pretence,
preferring real mire to sham down, fled from the piteous tragedy.

He might have retired more conventionally. He might have had a dismal
explanatory interview with Joanna, and ordered a fly to convey himself
and his luggage to the Railway Station the next morning. Perhaps if
Joanna had found him in the November Sunday afternoon garden this might
have occurred. But Joanna did not find him. His temperament found him
instead; and when you have a temperament like Paragot's, it plays the
very deuce with convention. It drew him out of the garden, across the
Channel and into the society of Bubu le Vainqueur. But, all the same, in
the essential act of leaving Melford, Paragot behaved like the man of
fine honour I shall always maintain him to be.

How many men of speckless reputation, though feeling the pinch of
poverty, would not have married Joanna for the great wealth her husband
left behind? Answer me that.

I know that Joanna wept bitterly over her lost