l stove, but the Jewess in
Arithelli found him wanting in the "divers washings" she required of
the saucepans, and they generally ended these Bohemian repasts with a
quarrel.

She went about her work in a half-stupefied state, as one who is
perpetually in a trance. She was past fear now. Nothing mattered.
Midnight rides on a mule up in the mountains, meetings in the low
quarter of the town, the danger of being arrested while carrying a
despatch.

"_C'est ainsi que la vie_!" Emile's motto had become also her own.

She was once more a perfect machine. Even the only thing that
Sobrenski could find to say against her was that her appearance was too
conspicuous for a conspirator and that her hands and feet would betray
her through any disguise.

Emile, though still outwardly as unsympathetic as ever, was not blind
to the change in her looks and manner.

Putting the Cause out of the question, he did not wish "Fatalite" to
get ill. Her company amused and distracted him.

He liked to hear her views on life, and to colour them with his own
cynicism, and he enjoyed teaching her to sing and hearing her argue.

For all her quiet she was curiously magnetic and had a way of making
her absence felt. She was never noisy or exacting and had none of the
pride or vices of her sex, and though she was often depressed she was
never bored, and in consequence bored no one.

They had many traits in common, including fatalism and morbidity, for
the Slav temperament is in a hundred ways akin to that of the Celt.

In spite of his jeering remarks Emile thoroughly appreciated the girl's
pluck, and knew that if she failed it would be purely from physical
reasons.

"Iron in a velvet sheath," he had described her, and iron did not
bend--it broke.

After some consideration he approached the very unapproachable Manager.
"It's time you gave your leading _equestrienne_ a holiday," he
observed. "She's getting ill. If you don't let her have a rest soon
she'll be falling off in public, or having some fiasco. She was half
dead the other night after the performance."

The Manager made profane remarks in the dialect of Silesia, of which
place he was a native. He was fresh from quarrelling for the hundredth
time with Estelle, and was in the last frame of mind to desire rest or
peace for any inhabitant of the globe.

By himself and everyone else at the Hippodrome, Arithelli was
considered the property of the Anarchist, and Emile had take