ation, and I cannot afford to risk the renewing of it I
am seriously afraid that I shall have in future to deny myself the
privileges of a very pleasant friendship.'

'Your will shall be my law,' said Paul 'I have no excuse to urge, and
have certainly no complaint to make of your decision. I shall go at your
command, Gertrude----'

She waved the paper-knife against him with a gesture which seemed to
protest against that one dear familiarity.

'I beg your pardon,' he cried; 'the name escaped me. I shall not have
the chance to use it often after this, and you may let it pass. I am
going, but I must tell you this: I have not been very fortunate in my
choice of friends amongst women, or in the choice which has been thrust
upon me, and so long as I live I shall remember----' He paused, and
waited for a while until he regained the mastery of himself. Then he
went on steadily, with a level voice almost as if he were a schoolboy
reading from a lesson-book: 'I shall remember as long as I live the
beautiful thoughts with which you have inspired me, your kindness, your
friendship--and, and----'

He never knew how it happened--men of his temperament never do know--but
he was on his knees before her, and the words burst from him with a sob.

'And--you!'

She smiled upon him from the maternal height of the coquette who is a
year or two older than the man she coquets with.

The tears were in his eyes and on his cheeks, and glistened in the
virgin beard. She stooped forward and laid a hand upon his head.

'Do you care so much to leave me, Paul?' she asked.

A man of the world would have known the studied quaver in the voice--the
throaty, stagey sweetness of it. What was to be expected of a yokel of
genius who had been rushed through a hundred towns or so in everlasting
association with De Vavasours and Montmorencys--rushed through London
and through Paris under much the same inauspicious petticoat influences,
and had hardly ever met a real live lady in his life on terms of
intimacy until now? And Madame la Baronne de Wyeth had told him enough
and had shown him enough in the way of correspondence with distinguished
people of both hemispheres to let him know that she could play the
part of _grand dame_ at discretion anywhere. That was possibly the
preponderant influence in his mind. Had he himself been a gentleman
by extraction, had he been able to meet this exquisite and delicate
creature of old dreams and modern conditions on