prived of the excitement of a romance or scandal.

She knew it would be useless to make enquiries. If it had been left
there it had been done late at night, and the dressing-rooms were
always cleaned early next morning, and it would have been swept away
with the other rubbish.

She had not said anything about her loss to Vardri. It would make him
even more anxious than herself, and she must bear the penalty of her
own carelessness.

She hoped that after all it would come to light in some box or drawer
among her clothes.

She came forward noiselessly across the polished, carpetless floor.

"_Bon jour_, Emile! You wanted me?"

He pointed to a chair.

"Sit down! Your hat is on crooked--as usual! Are you so little of a
woman that you never use a mirror?"

A gleam of fun lit up her eyes.

"You covered mine up the other night with that horrible wreath and
streamers. I can only see myself in little bits now."

"Well, sit down and I'll talk to you presently."

Emile returned to the sorting and destruction of his correspondence,
and Arithelli lay back in her chair with a sigh of content, and closed
her eyes. When she opened them again he was standing beside her with a
glass of red wine in his hand.

"Drink this," he said, giving it to her.

"It isn't _absinthe_, is it?" she asked. "I can't see in this light,
and I don't want--"

"It doesn't matter what it is or what you want. Don't argue, but
finish it. How fond you women are of talking!" He waited till she had
obeyed him.

"You see that music? Well, you can take it back with you. I shall not
have any more use for music when I leave here. And listen to me now,
and don't go to sleep for the next five minutes if you can help it."

He kept full control of himself and his feelings. If anything his
voice was a little more rasping than usual, and his dry words of
counsel and advice were spoken in his ordinary hard, practical manner.
An outsider would have found it difficult to say which was the more
indifferent in appearance of these two who had been so strangely
intimate for half a year, and who were now about to part.

The girl was apathetic from physical fatigue and past emotions.

She thought as she looked round the familiar room how impossible it was
to believe that she would never be there again after to-day, and that
Emile would never again come to her.

The wine cleared her brain and made her blood run more quickly. She
roused herself t