of vows was offered
under the necessity of constant watchfulness and self-guardianship, the
meal was not an important matter.

'But,' said Gertrude, 'my dear Paul, you must really do justice to my
table; the pretence must be absolute.'

'I will try to make it so,' he answered; but the luxurious meal had no
more relish for him than if it had been desert sand. He struggled with
it manfully, however, and contrived to keep astride his end of the
see-saw of pretence.

Who are the best and who the worst of women? Did any man ever venture to
impugn the fair fame of Madame la Baronne de Wyeth? Yet, had the devil
a better ally anywhere than this delicate little purring white-breasted
epicure in the varying flavours of the ruined soul? Oh, the devil is, of
course, a symbol! Let the phrase pass.

But the Paul Armstrong of ten years later, perched in his fog-bound
eyrie, staring along the unseen gorge? He tells himself that had she
been what he believed her, he might have been elsewhere than where he
finds himself. There had been but a surface ash upon the seeming ruin
of a life. There was something still to build upon, but she must needs
destroy what was left. There was wholesome blood in the veins of the man
who aspired to rebuild, and it was she who poisoned its fount.

'"Queen bee of the honey asps,"' quoth Paul of the eyrie: and he was
back in Paris.

He was back at Gertrude's table, the worshipped, the immaculate Gertrude
of those days.

They had reached the end of the repast, and coffee was served in little
cups of eggshell china encased in filigree gold.

'A gift from the Khedive,' she said, indicating these. 'Sardou was with
me when I was in Alexandria.' She laughed, and what with her eyes, to
which a single glass of the rare hock had given an added sparkle, and
what with her faultless teeth, she fairly dazzled on her companion.
'Yes, that is the creature's absurd name. Sardou is the solemn personage
who has been waiting upon us all the morning, and his godfathers and
godmothers had the impertinence to baptize him in the name of Victor. I
was telling you that Sardou was with me in Alexandria when the Khedive
was so gracious as to offer me this little souvenir, and I implored his
Highness that he might be permitted to make a study in coffee in the
palace kitchen. He made it, and the result is adorable. _Inter alia_,'
she said in the same tone, 'you, too, are adorable this morning, and
now I think I may snatch a l