MADAME X

A STORY OF MOTHER-LOVE

BY

J. W. McCONAUGHY

FROM THE PLAY OF THE SAME NAME

BY

ALEXANDRE BISSON

ILLUSTRATIONS BY

EDWARD C. VOLKERT

NEW YORK

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS

1910

[Table]

ELEGIE
(From the French of Massenet)
Oh, Spring of days long ago, blooming and bright,
Far have you fluttered away!
No more the skies azure light, caroling birds
Waken and glisten for me!
Bearing all joy from my heart—Loved one!
How far from my life hast thou flown!
Vainly to me does the springtime return!
It brings thee never again—Dark is the sun!
Dead are the days of delight!
Cold is my heart and as dark as the grave!
Life is in vain—evermore!

MADAME X

[CHAPTER I]

TWO INVALIDS

A night lamp—the chosen companion of illness, misery and murder—burned dimly on a little table in the midst of a grim array of bottles and boxes. In a big armchair between the table and the bed, and within easy reach of both, sat a young man. It was his fourteenth night in that chair and he leaned his head back against the cushions in an attitude of utter exhaustion. The hands rested on the arms with the palms turned up. But the strong, clean-cut face—that for two weeks had been a mask of fear and suffering—was transfigured with joy and thanksgiving when he reached over every few minutes and touched the forehead of the little boy in the bed. There was moisture under the dark curls and the fever flush had given way to the pallor of weakness.

Louis Floriot was a man with steel nerves and an unbending will. Barely in his thirty-first year, he was Deputy Attorney of Paris, and in all the two weeks he had watched at the bedside of his boy he had not been ten seconds late at the opening of court in the morning. His work and his child were all that were left to him and he divided the day between them without a thought of himself. The woman that had made both dear to him was gone. He had loved the baby with almost more than a father's love because he was hers—theirs. He had slaved for fame and power to lay them at her feet as a proof of his love.

Two short years ago it would have been impossible to find a happier man within the girth of the seven seas. Then one night he had returned from his office too early—returned to find his life in ruins and his home made desolate. And she had fled from him into the night and had gone out of his life—but not out of his memory.

He had striven with all the strength of his will to forget her; but in his heart he knew that as long as he breathed her image would be there. He worked with feverish energy and poured his love out on Raymond. The child was with him every moment that he was not in court or in his office, but his dark curly hair and great dark eyes were his mother's and forgetfulness did not lie that way.

In the two years that had passed since the whole scheme of his life had been shattered he had barely had time to piece together a make-shift plan that would give him an excuse for living. In this new plan Raymond was the one element of tenderness. But for his love for the boy he would have become as stem and inexorable as the laws in which he dealt. He could not tear Jacqueline out of his heart but he forced himself to remember only the bitterness of her perfidy.

In the past two weeks the memory had come back more bitterly. How different, he had thought in the long nights, if she had been there! They would have watched hand in hand and whispered hope and comfort to each other. One would have slept calmly when wearied, knowing that the tender love of the other guarded their baby. And what happiness would have been theirs that hour when the fever broke and Raymond passed from stupor to natural sleep! But she had not loved him—she had not even loved her boy; for she had deserted both.

Rose, the maid, who had been in their house since his marriage, softly opened the door and whispered that Madame Varenne was in the library waiting to see him. He rose with a sigh, and after a last look at the sleeping child, tiptoed out of the room and noiselessly shut the door behind him.

Madame Varenne was a sprightly young widow, the sister of Dr. Chennel, who attended Raymond as if the boy were his own son. Madame Varenne, too, had almost a motherly affection for the child and something beyond admiration for the handsome, slightly grayed father. They supposed, as did everyone else in Passy, that Madame Floriot was dead. Floriot was living in Paris when she left him and he moved out to Passy shortly afterward.

He shook hands with her cordially as he came in.

"How kind of you to come, Madame Varenne!" he said, gratefully. The young woman looked up at him with a happy smile.

"I am delighted with the news that Rose has just given me!" she exclaimed, pressing his hand.

"Yes," he smiled wearily, "our nightmare is over and it was time it finished. I couldn't have held out much longer."

"You have had a bad time of it," she murmured, sympathetically.

"It hasn't been easy. And I shall never be able, to thank your brother enough for what he has done for me," and Floriot's voice trembled.

"He has thought of nothing else beside the boy for weeks and he was always talking about him," declared Madame Varenne, shaking her head. "The day before yesterday he went to see one of his old professors to consult him on the treatment, and he was hard at work that night experimenting and reading."

Floriot nodded.

"He tells me that it was then that he got the idea which has saved Raymond's life. I owe my boy's life to your brother, Madame Varenne," he added, his voice vibrant with gratitude, "and you may be sure that I will never forget it."

"What he has done has been its own reward," she replied gently. "My brother is so fond of Raymond!"

Floriot smiled tenderly.

"And you?"

"Oh, I love the child!" she exclaimed.

"He loves you, too," Floriot assured her. "You were the first person he asked for when the fever left him. And now, that we are alone for a moment I want to take the opportunity of thanking you from the bottom of my heart!"

"Thanking me! For what?"

"For your friendship."

"How absurd you are!" she laughed. "Then I ought to be making pretty speeches to you to thank you for yours as well!"

"It is not quite the same thing," returned Floriot. "You are a charming, happy, amiable and altogether delightful woman while I—Well, I'm just a bear."

"You don't mean to say so!" she exclaimed, with a look of mock alarm.

"Oh, yes!" he nodded with a smile. "Bear is the only word that describes me—an ill-tempered bear, at that!"

"You will never be as disagreeable as my husband was!" And Madame Varenne shook her head decidedly. Floriot laughed.

"Really! Was he even gloomier than I?"

"My husband! Good gracious me! You are a regular devil of a chap compared to him!" exclaimed the sprightly lady, earnestly. Again Floriot burst into a laugh. It was the first exercise of the kind he had had in some time.

"You can't have amused yourself much," he suggested. "You can't have had a wildly merry time."

"I didn't!" was the forcible response. "But now everything and everybody appear charming by contrast!"

"Even I?" he smiled.

"Yes, even you!" she admitted, with another smile. At that moment her brother entered and Floriot greeted him affectionately. His first questions were about Raymond and the replies were satisfactory. He rubbed his hands enthusiastically and busied himself with his bag, while Floriot attempted to continue his speech of thanks in the face of protests from both.

"There, there, there!" broke in the doctor. "How do you know that we are not both of us sowing that we may reap? One never knows how useful it may be to be friends with a man in your profession," he chuckled.

Madame Varenne made her adieux and left with a rather wistful look at Floriot as she pressed his hand. She promised to come back the first thing in the morning.

"And now, friend Floriot," said the doctor, looking at him gravely, "as the boy is out of danger, you begin taking care of yourself."

Floriot stared at him in surprise.

"Why, there's nothing the matter with me!" he exclaimed.

"Oh, yes, there is!" retorted the man of medicine. "And a great deal more than you think!"

"Nonsense!" said Floriot, lightly. "I'm a little tired, but a few days' rest will——"

"No, no, no!" interrupted the doctor, with an energetic shake of the head. "You are working too much and you are taking too little exercise. You brood and worry over things and you must take a cure!"

"What sort of a cure?" inquired Floriot, with an uneasy glance.

"Every morning, no matter what the weather is, you must take a smart two hours' walk."

"But, my dear fellow——"

"You must walk at a smart pace for two hours," insisted the doctor. "And you must feed heartily."

"My dear fellow, I can hardly get through a cutlet for my lunch!" protested Floriot.

"I will let you off to-day, but from to-morrow on you must eat two," he continued firmly, as if he had not heard the interruption. Considering that luncheon was some eight hours in the past, this was not much of a concession.

"I shall never be able to do anything of the sort!" Floriot declared.

"Oh, yes, you will!" the doctor assured him with exasperating confidence. "On your way home every evening you must look in at the fencing school and fence for half-hour, take a cold shower and walk home."

"Walk! Out to Passy?"

"Out to Passy."

"My dear doctor," he smiled pityingly, "I can't possibly follow your prescription. I haven't the time."

"Then you must get married," returned the doctor calmly. Floriot gazed at him for a few moments in dumb amazement and then laughed amusedly.

"Distraction of some sort is absolutely necessary for your case," the doctor explained as gravely as a judge. "There is nothing to be startled at—you've been married before"—Floriot winced—"you can do so again. A lonely life is not the life for you. Look out for a happy-minded woman, who will keep you young and be a mother to your child, and marry her. I have an idea," he smiled knowingly, "that you won't have much difficulty in finding the very woman!"

In a flash the young lawyer saw what was in his friend's mind. He saw, too, that he must make him a confidant—tell him a story that he had sworn should never be put into words. For almost a minute emotion held him tongue-tied.

Then he said brokenly:

"My friend, I see now that I ought to—I ought to have—told you before. I—am not a widower!"

Dr. Chennel fell back against the table astounded.

"Not a widower!" he gasped.

"My wife is living," said Floriot in a low, unsteady voice. "After three years of married life—she left me—with a lover. I came home unexpectedly one day—and found them—together. They rushed out of the house in terror. I should have killed them both, I think, if they had not run."

The doctor murmured something meant to be sympathetic. He was too much amazed for speech.

"I have sometimes thought of telling you, but, somehow, I could not talk of it. Chennel, old man!" he cried, miserably, laying his hand on his friend's arm, "you can't guess how horribly unhappy I am!"

"Then—you—you love her still?" asked the doctor, gently. Floriot bowed his head to conceal the agony written on his face and threw up a hand in a gesture of despair.

"I can think of no other woman! God knows, I have tried hard to forget her! She was the whole joy of my life—my life itself! I cannot tell you how I suffered. I would have died if I had dared. But I thought of the child, and that saved me from suicide. I remembered my duty to the boy and the thought of it kept me alive. If I had lost him——" He choked and turned abruptly away.

"He will be running about in a week," said the doctor's quiet voice.

"Thanks to you, doctor, thanks to you!" he cried, his eyes shining with tears and gratitude as he turned to his friend with both hands outstretched. "You have saved both of our lives!"

They were gripping each other's hands hard when Rose appeared at the door to announce that Master Raymond was awake. Arm in arm they hurried off to the sick-room. Rose was about to follow a little later when she heard the buzz of the muffled door bell.

"It is Monsieur Noel," she thought as she hurried to the door. Noel Sauvrin, a life-long friend of Floriot's expected to reach the house in Passy from the south of France that night.

She opened the door with a smile of welcome that changed to a stare of frightened astonishment. There was a quick swish of skirt, a half-sob of "Rose!" a half-smothered exclamation of "Madame!" and a young woman threw herself into the maid's arms.

Jacqueline Floriot had returned.

[CHAPTER II]

THE RETURN

Madame Floriot's face told its own story of remorse and suffering. The cheeks had lost their smooth, lovely contour and the dark clouds under the beautiful eyes spoke of nights spent in tears. The eyes themselves were now dilated as she gripped the maid's arms until she hurt her and gazed into her face with searching dread.

"My boy! Raymond!" she gasped, brokenly. "Is it true—has he been ill?"

The maid gently disengaged herself from the clinging arms and glanced uneasily at the library door. Madame Floriot followed the look and moved quickly forward as the maid answered: "For more than two weeks, madame."

The woman timidly pushed the door open and stepped into the library. She gave a quick gasp of relief when she saw that the room was empty.

"I only heard of—it—yesterday—by accident," she half-whispered, her hand at her throat. Then as the memory of the hours of grief and dread swept over her she cried:

"Rose, I must see him!"

The maid looked her alarm.

"Monsieur Floriot is with him, madame!"

"Ah—h!" she stifled a sob.

"Poor little chap!" said Rose, tenderly. "We thought he could never get over it!"

The tortured mother sank into a chair with a moan of anguish.

"But the danger is over now," continued Rose, gently. "The doctor says he will soon be well again."

Jacqueline's eyes fell on a photograph of the boy on the table beside her and she seized it with both hands and held it to her face.

"My Raymond! My laddie!" she sobbed, softly. "How he has grown! How big—and strong—he looks!"

"He does not look strong now, madame," and Rose shook her head.

"To think—that he might have died! And I should never have seen him again! My darling, my little laddie!" The face of the picture was wet with tears and kisses. "I wonder if he will recognize me! Does he remember me at all?" she cried eagerly.

The maid gave a start and an exclamation of alarm.

"Here's Monsieur Floriot!"

Jacqueline rose unsteadily with a smothered cry and all but reeled toward the door. In a moment Rose's arm was around her.

"No, no!" she whispered, reassuringly. "I was mistaken! I thought I heard him coming."

The woman stood with both hands pressed to her breast and Rose watched her pityingly. She had loved her young mistress dearly and had seen much in her short married life to which both husband and wife had been blind. It was several moments before Jacqueline had sufficiently recovered from the shock to speak.

"How—my heart—beats!" she panted. And then after another pause: "What—will he say—to me? But I don't care—I don't care what he says if he will only pardon me enough to let me stay here with my boy. If he—if he refuses to see me—I don't know what will happen to me! Rose! Rose!" she cried, piteously, sobbing on the maid's shoulder, "I—I am afraid!"

Rose patted her shoulder and murmured sympathy until the sobs became less violent. Then she suggested gently:

"Wouldn't it be better to write to Monsieur Floriot, madame? He does—he doesn't expect you and—you know how quick-tempered he is."

"I have written to him! I have written three letters in the last three weeks and he has not answered them."

"He didn't open them," said Rose, very low.

There was another convulsive sob and then Jacqueline straightened and threw back her head, her eyes shining with feverish resolve.

"I must see him! I will see him!" she cried in a high, unnatural voice. "He cannot—he must not condemn me unheard! He loved me a little once—he must hear me now! Does he ever speak of me?"

The maid sadly shook her head.

"Never, madame."

"Never!" she echoed faintly.

"No, madame."

Jacqueline turned away for a moment with a sob of despair.

"What did he say—what did he do when I—left? Do you remember?"

Rose shuddered at the recollection.

"I shall never forget it! He was like a madman! He shut himself up in his room for days together and wouldn't see anyone. Once he went out and was gone for twenty-four hours. I used to listen outside his door and I heard him sobbing and crying. I was so frightened once that in spite of his orders I went into his room. It was in the evening and he was sitting by the fire burning your letters and photographs and the tears were rolling down his cheeks!"

Jacqueline listened white-faced, and as Rose told the story of her husband's grief a sudden gleam of hope made her dizzy and faint. He had loved her deeply, after all! He must still love her a little! She had not lost everything!

"The boy saved his brain, I think," Rose was saying, but she barely heard her. "He never would let him leave him, night or day. Then he began to calm down a little and seemed to settle to his work again. He has worked a little harder than before—that's all. Then we moved out here," she added.

Jacqueline turned to her and she was more nearly calm than she had been at any moment since entering the house.

"Rose, I must see him!" she cried, determinedly. "Go and tell him that a lady wants to speak to him, but do not let him guess who it is!"

"Ah, but——"

"Rose, I beg of you!"

The maid shook her head doubtfully and then with a sigh of resignation, went out to carry the message. Jacqueline, her knees trembling, dropped weakly into a chair and strove to compose herself for the terrible interview to come. In returning she had had no hope of forgiveness, for she had not believed that her husband had ever truly loved her. But now that she had gained hope from Rose's story of his grief her emotions were beyond control.

There was no natural vice in her, and for that reason she had walked in the purgatory of the fallen who are still permitted to see themselves with the eyes of the virtuous. Vice breeds callousness. She had been gay, witty, laughter-loving and emotional. Without love, as she understood it, she felt herself to be incomplete. She had worshipped her husband, but at last had come to believe that she was giving far more than she received. She never knew the heart of the silent, serious, hard-working man. Her vanity was hurt, and through her vanity she fell—to be driven away from her husband and her boy.

Her boy! For two years she had thought of little else, had dreamed of nothing else but the hour when she would be permitted to hold him to her breast. Surely, even the stem attorney who had loved her once would not deny her the mother's right to be with her child in his illness! He must permit her to live where she could see her boy sometimes and watch him grow to manhood!

She picked up the photograph and kissed it passionately again and again.

"Oh, my darling, my dear one! My laddie!" she half sobbed. "If it were not for you I——"

A door facing her opened softly and her husband stepped into the room!

[CHAPTER III]

MAGDALEN

Floriot did not recognize her as he entered. She was rising and her head was bowed. He turned slowly with hand still on the knob of the door and their eyes met! Every muscle in his body grew rigid and the pallor of his face, born of his long nights in the chair by his boy's bed, changed slowly to a pasty, sickly white. The woman gazed at him with heaving bosom and hope and dread in her eyes.

"You——!" he choked. Jacqueline timidly took a half step toward him, and clasped her hands.

"Yes—I. I——," she began fearfully, but the sound of her voice galvanized the statue at the door.

"Leave this house!" he commanded sternly and he advanced firmly into the room.

"Louis! I——"

"Leave this house at once!" he interrupted, his voice rising with his anger.

"Listen, Louis, please! I——"

"Go! Do you hear me!" he cried furiously as he stalked past her, opened the door into the hall, and held it for her to pass out. Jacqueline crept toward him looking up with frightened, tear-stained face.

"Yes, yes! I will go, I will go!" she panted hurriedly. "I—I promise I will go right away! But, please, Louis, listen—one moment, please!"

He looked at the crouching, pleading figure and the anger in his face gave way to an expression as indescribable as unforgettable, and he sharply turned away.

"Well, what is it then? Be quick! What do you want?" he demanded roughly.

She sank to her knees and raised her hands to him in piteous appeal.

"Louis, forgive me! For——"

"What!" His voice startled her like a pistol shot. But she stammered on:

"Forgive me, Louis, so——"

He slammed the door and in two strides was standing over with clenched fists. She could not meet his furious eyes and her head bowed almost to his feet.

"Forgive you! Forgive you!" and he laughed a short, bitter laugh that was more terrible and hope-destroying than curses would have been to the crouching woman. "For two years I have lived day and night with the thought of you in another man's arms and your kisses on his lips! And you ask me to forgive you! You——"

"Louis! Louis!" she moaned. "In our child's name——"

"Stop!" he broke in sternly. "Don't dare to mention him! He is nothing to you and you are nothing to him! He is mine—mine only! Did you think of him when you left us?"

"Louis, for God's sake! I was mad! I was——"

"Oh, of course!" his harsh laugh grated in again. "That is about what I expected." Then his face hardened and he lashed her with his scorn.

"I was false to my husband. I deserted my child—I was mad! I stole out of my home like a thief and took all of its happiness with me—I was mad! I went away with my lover to what I believed would be a life of pleasure—I was mad!"

I trampled on every "Louis! Louis!" she sobbed, and writhed at his feet. "It's the truth! I was mad! I——"

"The truth! Hah! Would you like to hear the truth? You were tired of being an honorable woman—a pure mother! You were tired of me and loved—him! That's the truth! You loved him, didn't you? You loved him!"

"He loved me! He said he would kill himself for me! And I——"

"And you believed him! You never thought of me and I"—for a moment grief conquered anger and his voice broke—"I worshipped you! And ours was a love match," he went on bitterly, "for you told me once a thousand years ago that you loved me!"

His face worked, in a spasm of anguish, and he tried to move away, but the woman clutched a leg of his trousers with both hands and lifted her head suddenly.

"And it was—it is true, Louis!" she cried desperately.

His look was more than answer enough.

"It is! It is, Louis!" she pleaded feverishly. "We didn't understand each other, that's all! It was my fault, my fault! You loved me passionately but I did not know it! I could not see it! And you made me only part of your home—never part of your life! I was never your friend—you were gentle with me, but you never took me into your life—you never really knew my heart, and with you I always felt alone. I loved you but"—she fought for breath and coherence—"but I was always afraid of you—you were so serious and severe! I wanted to laugh and have a good time! You never noticed it—you had your work, your ambitions, your legal friends and I—had nothing! Nothing!" she sobbed. "And I was so young—twenty! Hardly twenty! Oh, Louis, forgive me! Forgive me!"

Floriot half staggered to a chair and sank into it. The unexpectedness of the soul-wracking scene coming on top of the strain of his two weeks' vigil in the sick-room was almost too much for even his iron nerve. Jacqueline, huddled on the floor, was sobbing convulsively. He buried his face in his hands and groaned. At the sound she struggled to her feet and took a step toward him, gasping to control her heaving bosom. He waved a hand toward the door without raising his head.

"Louis!" she cried passionately, desperately, "you would not condemn the lowest criminal if there were any defense for him, and I am the mother of your boy! It is all my fault, but you could have helped me if you would! You swore to love, honor and protect me, and did you do it? You loved me but you never honored me! You did not think I was worthy to be the companion to you that a wife should be! You looked for companionship to your friends. I might as well have been your mistress! Did you protect me? You brought him to the house the first time? You said he was your friend and you encouraged me to be kind to him. You permitted him to be my escort wherever I wanted to go, because my pleasure would not then interfere with your work or your plans!"

She choked. Floriot did not stir.

"He grew to be everything to me that you should have been. He sympathized with me in everything! He anticipated every thought and desire! You would not even make an effort to please me if my request interfered with your work—always your work!"

"Life of pleasure!" she quoted bitterly. "Louis, I never loved him! You angered me and hurt me because you would not let me come close to your real life. And I—I—Louis, I was mad! But you could have saved me! A little attention—if I could have felt that I was anything more than a plaything—something to amuse you in the few minutes that you ever took for amusement—Louis.. you will never know how I fought with myself—the torture of those days—and when I came to you for help——!" The words died away in a sob. There was no sound from the husband but the labor of his breathing.

"Do you remember a few days before—before—I—the night I—left—I wanted you to go to Fontainebleau with me and you wouldn't? And I went with—him! That day in the park he—kissed my hands—and the lace of my dress—and said he would kill himself at my feet if I didn't love him——!" She stopped with a gasp and went on, bringing the words out in broken phrases.

"I made him take me home—I was running from him—from myself—to you! I found you in your study and begged you—to go out with me! I wanted to—show myself—that I loved you only! Do you remember what you said? 'I'm too busy. Run along—and get Lescelles to take you!'"

"Oh, Louis, Louis!" she cried, throwing herself at his feet, while the storm of weeping shook her again, "you could have saved me then!"

Still the bowed figure in the chair did not stir. He was so numbed that his consciousness seemed to be that of another—watching, listening and judging. He was the type of man whom Duty, once embraced, grips with hug like the Iron Maiden's, and even gains a monstrous pleasure as life itself or all that makes life worth while is slowly crushed out. Had she come a month before this scene would have left him unshaken, but now——!

His boy—their boy—lay up-stairs, saved from death by a miracle. Her clasped hands rested on one of his knees and her head touched his arms. His eyes were closed, but he nearly swooned when he breathed the perfume of her hair that brought back the picture of a dark head on the white pillow in the dim moonlight or the gray of dawn.

Then came the terrible thought that for two years that picture had been the joy of another.... Fragments of his talk with Madame Varenne flashed through his mind. Was there a little fault on his side?... He need not speak a word. He had but to open his eyes and look forgiveness and her warm body would be pressed again to his breast, her soft arms would be around his neck and her soft lips would shower kisses on his face. ... He drew a sharp breath and rose slowly and uncertainly.

"Jacqueline!" he said in an unsteady voice, not daring to let his wavering eyes look down. "Jacqueline, you must go!"

A long, convulsive sob and:

"Ah, why did I go at all? Why did I ever go?" she moaned. "You would have killed me and that would have been the end of it! Louis, forgive me! Forgive me!" And she clasped his limp hand in both of hers and looked up piteously.

"No! No!" he cried, fighting desperately with an impulse to stoop and crush the slender body in his arms and kiss the tears from the upturned face. "Surely, you see that I——"

"What will become of me?" she pleaded, as her instinct told her that he was weakening.

"Go back to him! Go back to the man who would have killed himself for you!" he cried in a voice that he tried in vain to make as bitter as the words. And he made no effort to free his hand. The answer was a barely audible whisper:

"He is dead!"

Floriot jerked his hand away with an exclamation of horror and sprang back, his eyes flashing with anger.

"So that is why you've come back!" he blazed furiously.

"No! No!" she protested, frightened, struggling to her feet with arms outstretched. "I came to see our boy—our Raymond! To beg you—to——"

"Leave the house"

The flaming scorn in his eyes stopped her.

"And I was on the point of yielding!" His laugh made the woman wince. "What a fool I was! I actually believed you! So he is dead, is he?"

She bowed her head in utter despair.

"I wrote—to tell you."

"And now that he is dead you thought of me again—of me, of your idiot of a husband"—his voice rose with fury—"the simple-minded fool who would be only too glad to take you back again!"

"Louis, I love you—I wanted to see you, to see our child again! Can't you see I've changed?" she pleaded. She threw open her arms and tears ran unheeded down her face.

"Changed! Hah!—Leave the house!" and he pointed imperiously to the door.

"Louis, it's true! Let me see our boy again!"—

"He has forgotten you!"

"Let me kiss him—just once!" she begged.

"He believes you to be dead!" he said, with cold cruelty. The mother rushed to him with half-stifled shriek and terror in her face.

"Louis! No! No!" she screamed, "No! No! No!"

"He does!"

"Louis, no! Don't say that!" Horror was driving her to hysteria. "It can't be true! You wouldn't tell him that! Louis, you loved me once! You loved me! It's not possible! I am your wife—his mother! His mother!"

Floriot eyed her, cold and unmoved.

"You have gone out of his life and mine," he replied calmly. Jacqueline moaning, sank to the floor.

"Oh, my God!" she prayed. "Help me! Help me! Louis, be kind to me! A life of repentance——"

He pulled her roughly to her feet and half-carried her toward the door.

"Don't take my child away from me!" she panted, struggling.

"Go! Leave the house!"

"Oh! Let me see him! I won't—speak! Let me kiss him! I won't—say a word!" she gasped as they reached the door and he pushed her violently through into the hall.

"Louis! Pity—! Raymond! My child, my——"

The slam of the door cut off the sound of the pleading voice from his ears. He held the knob to prevent her from reopening it. For a few moments there was silence. Then Floriot heard through the door something between a choke and a sob and the quickly receding rustle of skirts. The bang of the outside door echoed through the silent house.

[CHAPTER IV]

OPENING FOR THE DEFENSE

For more than a minute Floriot stood motionless, but now he was leaning his weight on the hand that held the knob. He listened—half-hoping, half-fearing that he would hear her at the outside door—and then staggered across the room and collapsed into the chair where she had sat, lying with arms and head on the table above the photograph that Jacqueline had kissed. He had won—but to know that he would have found happiness in defeat.

"God!" he groaned aloud. "She's gone! She's gone! And I love her! I love her! And I shall never see her again! She must never see Raymond! Her influence would be——No!" he cried, as if fighting something within himself. "She must never come back. God give me strength to forget!" he prayed in anguish. "Let me forget! Let me forget!"

There was a sound of someone at the door leading to the stairway, and he barely had time to wipe the moisture from his forehead and half-compose himself before Dr. Chennel swung breezily into the room.

"He's doing splendidly!" cried the doctor with a cheery smile. "And he's hungry—the best sign in the world! I have left my orders with the nurses." He began packing his little bag on a side table. "He's to have a little milk and three spoonfuls of soup before he goes to sleep and nothing else until I come again in——Why, what's the matter?" he cried in alarm, hurrying over to his friend as he caught a glimpse of his face. "Are you ill?"

Floriot straightened up and put out his hand. His face was lined and livid and his eyes were wild with grief.

"My dear—doctor!" he said, brokenly, "I have just gone through—the most awful fifteen minutes of my life. My—my wife—has been here!"

"Your wife!" The doctor fell back a step and stared at him. Floriot buried his face in his handkerchief.

"Yes, she has—just gone! You can imagine—how I felt No, you can't!" he cried, bitterly, springing up with clenched fists. "For a moment I was afraid of myself—afraid that I would kill her!"

Dr. Chennel watched the writhing face in silence as Floriot paced wildly up and down the room.

"Doctor, in these few minutes—I have lived five years over again! All the joy, all the miseries, all my love, all her——"

The other stopped him with a gentle touch on the arm.

"Floriot, my friend," he said quietly, "sit down a moment and try to get hold of yourself."

The calm strong voice of the physician had the effect that he desired. Floriot's shoulders squared and his voice grew firm.

"You're right, Doctor. I will forget all about it! Do you know why she came back?" he added bitterly. "Her lover is dead!"

Rose opened the hall door.

"Monsieur Noel has come, sir!"

Floriot nodded.

"Show him in here, Rose," he said quietly and turned to Dr. Chennel. "Noel is an old and very dear friend whom I thought dead until this morning," he explained. "Poor chap! He and I——"

A well-set-up young man—apparently several years younger than Floriot, though his hair was more heavily grayed—entered the library with a springy step and cheery call of:

"Well, here I am! And very much alive!"

His blue eyes were smiling and his white teeth gleamed in the lamplight but his face bore the marks of storms that sweep the soul. And on his right temple was visible the end of a large scar that extended up under the hair.

"My dear old Noel!" exclaimed Floriot, hurrying to meet him with both hands extended. The friends stood with their hands locked and looked each other over with the affection mixed with curiosity that may be marked when two who have been as brothers meet after a long separation. "This is my friend, Dr. Chennel," said Floriot, turning at last. "Shake hands with him, old man! He has just saved my boy's life!"

"Then I'm more than glad to shake you by the hand, Doctor," said Noel, gracefully, as he took the doctor's fingers in his. "For anything that touches Floriot comes very near to me!"

The doctor bowed his appreciation and Floriot, who had never taken his eyes off his friend, remarked with a smile:

"You look in very good health for a dead man." Noel turned and asked with whimsical surprise: "Then you heard of my suicide?"

"Yes," returned his friend gravely, "and the papers said you were dead."

"In the words of a great American humorist," laughed Noel, 'The report was greatly exaggerated!'"

"Two bullets, they said."

"Yes, and they were right," nodded the "suicide," brightly. "But two bullets were not enough for me. I've always been a bit hardheaded, you know, though one of the doctors had another explanation."

The other two looked at him inquiringly, particularly Dr. Chennel, who was prepared to combat any heretical theory.

"When I was on the highway to recovery," resumed Noel, "one of the doctors told me that he didn't think that I would ever get to be marksman enough to hit my brain. Said I ought to practise trying to hit a pea in a wine barrel before I tried it again. Then I found out I could laugh," and he burst into one to prove it, "and decided that as long as I could take enough interest in life to laugh there was no occasion for my going on with my suicide plans."

Dr. Chennel and Floriot joined in the laugh with considerable restraint and the former felt that he was the "undesirable third."

"Well, I must be going," he said, gathering up his hat and bag and shaking hands with both the friends. "You have a good deal to tell each other. I'll be back in the morning," he added to Floriot. Then with many injunctions about the medicine and food he departed.

"And now," said Noel, putting a hand affectionately on each shoulder and holding his friend off at arm's length, "let me have a look at you, Louis, old man!" He paused and gravely scrutinized the smiling face. "Life has not been much kinder to you than to me, judging from your looks," he said at last. The hands fell and he turned away.

"Find me looking old, do you?"

"No, not old for your age," smiled Noel. "How old are you—forty?"

"Thirty-five!" protested Floriot.

"Well, nobody would say that you were a day more than forty-two!" his friend gravely assured him.

"Thank you!" was the ironic response, and they smiled into each other's eyes.

"Fancy! Five whole years since I saw you!"

"And five weeks' separation, in the old days, seemed a century!"

"You're going to stay here all night and take breakfast with me in the morning."

"Most assuredly."

"An early breakfast, though," Floriot smiled a warning. "I have to be in court at nine."

"Ah, of course!" nodded his friend. "You're Deputy Attorney now."

"Yes, I received my promotion more than a year ago."

"I always knew you'd get on!" exclaimed Noel, patting his shoulder.

Floriot turned away with a sigh.

"I have not much to worry about there," he said, without enthusiasm. "But, I want to hear about you, old man! What happened to you? Why did you want to commit suicide. Who was she?"

Noel threw him a quick, searching glance.

"It was a woman," he nodded.

"Of course it was! For some time before you went away I noticed a change in you."

Again there was the sharp look.

"Ah, you did, did you?"

"Yes, you were not as jolly and lively as you had been before," Floriot continued gently. "And you used to be away for days at a time; so I knew it must be a woman. You loved her?"

A long steady gaze answered him.

"And she was false to you?"

"She did not even know I loved her!" was the low response.

"Didn't you tell her?" asked Floriot, surprised.

"No!"

"Why?" he persisted with freedom of a friend. "Was she free?"

"She loved another man," replied Noel. There was not a tremor in his voice but he stood very still and did not meet his friend's questioning eyes. "When I heard of her marriage I felt that my life was of no particular use to me. So," with a shrug of the shoulders, "I tried to get rid of it—and failed. Ridiculous, eh?"

Floriot laid his hand on his friend's arm. The grip of the fingers told his unspoken sympathy.

"Oh, I am used to being a fool!" declared Noel, lightly, but with a sub-current of bitterness in his voice. "I was the fool of the family at home and one of the best jokes they ever had at school. I might have known that the woman I loved would have sense enough to pick out another man. I even made a fool of myself when I tried to take my life!"

"But you were badly hurt?"

"Pretty badly," replied Noel gravely; "but I was soon on my feet again. Then," the shrug again, "having nothing on earth to live for but an occasional laugh—which doesn't cost much—I made a ridiculous amount of money in the Canadian fur business."

"But, why didn't you write to me?" demanded Floriot, reproachfully. Noel turned to him apologetically.

"I wanted to forget and to be forgotten, old man," he said. "The papers reported me dead, and the fact that I didn't die didn't seem to interest them, so I seized the opportunity to stay dead until it suited my pleasure to come to life again."

"Are you married?"

"No!" was the emphatic reply. "I shall never marry!"

"So you still love her?"

Noel made an impatient movement

"I don't want anyone else!" he answered, curtly. "Besides, I'm too old to think of marrying now Let's talk about you, Louis. Are you happy? How is Jacqueline? Little Jennie Wren, we used to call her," he went on with a tenderly reminiscent smile. "What a pretty, lively little thing she was! I suppose she's more quiet now after five years with a solemn old crank like you. Why, Louis! What's the matter?"

Floriot had sunk into an armchair, his face white and drawn. In two strides his friend was beside him, bending over him in alarm.

"Don't—don't worry! It's nothing—nothing!" said Floriot unsteadily. "My child has been at death's door—for the last few days and I thought —I—had lost him. My nerves are just a little—out of joint. That's all!"

"My dear old chap!" cried Noel anxiously, "the boy is all right now?"

"Yes, Raymond's out of danger now." There was a long pause and then in altered tones Noel asked.

"And how old is this Monsieur Raymond?"

"Four."

"Quite a man. Is he your only child?" There was a curious strained quality in his voice. Floriot nodded.

"I will see him, of course?"

Floriot wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and returned it to his pocket. Then he replied more calmly.

"Certainly! In the morning. He can't be disturbed to-night."

There was another long pause broken by Noel.

"Don't tell your wife I'm here," he said. "I want to see her face when she comes in and sees me!" He walked slowly across the room with his back to his friend.

"You—won't see her," was the low reply. Noel turned quickly.

"Oh, she's away?"

Floriot leaned forward, his elbows on his knees and his face buried in his hands.

"Yes, she's—gone!"

"Gone!" echoed Noel in bewildered astonishment.

Floriot rose and lurched a step or two away. Noel could see less than his profile and barely caught the words, but they were enough to leave him momentarily tongue-tied and paralyzed with amazement.

"She left me—two years ago—with her lover!"

Noel stared at him, dumb with amazement, and stammered something incoherently, of which Floriot could catch only the words, "little Jennie Wren!" in tones of pity. He wheeled on him.

"You pity her!"

Noel raised his eyebrows and looked calmly at his friend.

"Is she not to be pitied most?" he asked gently.

"Do you think so?" cried Floriot bitterly. "Then, what of me who adored her—and whose life she wrecked? I am an old man at thirty-five You told me so, yourself! Now, you know why!"

The other half raised his hand and murmured something sympathetic.

"You can never imagine what these last two years have been to me!" Floriot's voice was hoarse with anguish. "I have been tom with jealousy and dreams of vengeance and tortured almost beyond endurance by the memory of the happiness I have lost!" He dropped, shuddering, into a chair, his handkerchief pressed to his face. Noel gazed at him in pitying silence for several minutes. Then he spoke as gently as before.

"And yet, she was not wicked," he said, and Floriot writhed. "She was only frivolous and wanted luxury and pleasure. Life was too serious a problem for her. And you never suspected anything?"

"No!" groaned the figure in the chair. "I loved her and believed in her."

Noel walked over and put his arm affectionately across his friend's bowed shoulders.

"My dear old man, brace up!" he said, with not quite enough cheerfulness to grate. "Remember you have your boy still and—who knows? One of these days, perhaps, she'll be bitterly sorry for the misery she has caused, and you'll see her here again, asking——"

"I have seen her again!"

"She came back then?" asked Noel, dropping back, startled, as Floriot sprang up, his face blazing with anger again.

"This very day she had the impudence——"

"She came back?" repeated Noel's quiet voice, insistently. "And for what?"

"Oh, not for much!" replied Floriot with bitter irony. "Merely to ask my pardon, and to ask me to take her back into my house—in her old place, between my son and myself!"

"And what did you say?" The gentle voice and mild blue eyes were turning hard and metallic. "I told her to go!"

"You turned her out?"

"Turned her out! Of course, I did!" And he stared in astonishment at his friend's set face and narrowed eyes.

"Floriot!" said Noel, sternly, "you have made a mistake! You turned her out in the street without knowing where she was going! My friend, unless, I'm badly mistaken myself, you'll be sorry for this in the morning!"

Floriot stood dumbly for a moment, twice began to speak, and then with a gesture of despair turned away. Noel watched him in silence. Presently he wheeled again, his face calm with some sudden resolve. The pain was in his eyes.

"Will you sit down, old man?" he said, quietly. "I want to tell you something."

[CHAPTER V]

CONTINUING FOR THE PROSECUTION

When Floriot swore that the story of the wreck of his life should never be told until Judgment Day he did not know that the only man to whom he could possibly have poured out his grief was alive, and he could not foresee that one day he would be so near to collapse that he would be forced to seek the relief of confession. It is rarely that high-strung, sensitive men can put into words such a story as that which Floriot was about to confide to his friend. That is why they call upon the gunsmith instead of the divorce court for aid in "cleansing their honor."

But now the need of counsel and comfort was strong upon him. Noel's refusal to agree with him, coming with the recollection of his owns wavering before his pleading wife, shook his faith in himself. He was willing to live again the terrible drama of his wrongs, and his grief to harden his bitter resolution and make a sure ally of Noel. The latter, when he was invited to sit down and listen, looked uncertainly at his friend's drawn face for a moment and then slowly settled back in the big chair, shading his eyes with his hands, until the other could barely tell whether they were open or closed. Floriot did not sit. He paced slowly up and down the room in silence as if preparing himself for the ordeal; and then he began.

"Noel, my friend," he said, in low steady tones, "there is no man—or woman—alive excepting you, to whom I could talk as I'm going to do. I have no one left in the world but you and my boy and, God knows, I need both of you—if there is a God," he added bitterly.

"You were about to defend her just now without question. You said that she was most to be pitied. I know why—you knew her before she was married. That was five years ago. Marriage develops people"—there was the bitter note again—"and she developed into a woman that you never knew and never dreamed could live in the same body with her. She had the happiness of a home and the life's happiness of two—and possibly three—persons in her hands. For the sake of a vicious intrigue which she now sees could never bring her anything but misery, she sacrificed her boy and me. And there is no consolation for me in the thought that she was caught in the ruins of the home that she pulled down!"

Noel stirred in his chair but did not speak. In spite of his breezy humor and love of light conversation he had been blessed with the divine power of silence.

"Her misery is no consolation to me," Floriot went on, his voice trembling slightly, "because I—I—old man, I still love her! And she loved me—for a year! Oh, Noel, that is the worst of the hell that I have lived in for two years! She loved me—for a year!"

He paused in his walk and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. Noel watched him silently.

"But I am not weak enough nor cowardly enough to let that weigh with me. The boy must be protected. He must never know that she is alive—never know what she did." He seemed to be talking more to himself than to his friend. "If she came back there is no knowing how long she would stay!" He clenched his fists end cried bitterly:

"The man who said that a woman who was untrue to one man would be untrue to two or a dozen knew her and her kind!"

Noel was motionless; and, after a few more turns up and down the room, Floriot went on:

"I know that she must have loved me, or why should she have married me? If she wanted position she could have married men farther up in the world than I was—than I am now. If she wanted money she could have married a bigger bank account than mine. No! She loved me—for a year. You said she was not naturally wicked. She was nothing else. Her love is a passion that bums itself out in a year and she will probably have a dozen lovers before she dies!"

There was a restless movement in the chair that Floriot did not notice.

"Noel, you can't realize the happiness of my life until I—I—learned that I was a fool! For the first year I pitied the whole world because it couldn't be as utterly happy as I was. It didn't seem possible that a man could be more completely filled with joy and content. Then our boy was born, and after that it seemed that before I had been miserable by contrast!" Anguish choked him and he was silent until he recovered control.

"Before that time I thought that I had fully the average man's capacity for work and then it was doubled. I was in my office early and late—every moment that I could tear myself away from my home. I even worked in my study at night so that I could be near her and our baby and still be struggling for them. And my spirit was always with her—at her feet—God! How I worshipped her!" he groaned, his hands pressed to his face. Again there was a silence in which Noel could hear his friend's heavy breathing.

"Noel," he went on at last, "if I had not lost belief in everything but hell, I would believe that God Himself must have destroyed my happiness because He envied me, and could promise me none in heaven to equal that I had on earth! It was too great, too complete, for this life!

"I had set my eyes on the position I now hold as the first big step in my climb, and I was tireless in my work for it. I was as sure that I would win as I was of the sanctity of my home. Then came the scandal in the Finance Department."

"Did you hear anything about it? Do you remember? Some rather big men were convicted."

Noel nodded almost imperceptibly.

"There was one brilliant young fellow in the lot, of whom you may not have heard—thanks to my efforts. Lescelles—Albert Lescelles. I was morally certain before I had been working on the case three days that he was innocent. The older and dishonest cabal had carefully prepared a chain of circumstantial evidence that would lead to Lescelles. None of my associates agreed with me, and that made my work harder; but I finally proved my theory to be the sound one, and you remember the sensation it created when the net of lies was finally ripped and some of our most respected public officers were dragged into the scandal.

"It was a great triumph for me, though my part in it was not generally known beyond official circles. Lescelles knew it and tried to kill me with gratitude. The day that he was discharged we were both drunk with excitement, and I insisted that he should come home to dinner with me that evening."

Floriot paused again in his tramp to and fro to wipe his moist brow.

"It was a merry dinner the three of us had that night! Lescelles was a brilliant young fellow and I never knew Jacqueline to be wittier or more entertaining. For the few months preceding she had been a little more contained and reserved, but she blossomed out into her old self.

"After dinner I left them together and went to my study to attend to some urgent matters that were to come up the next day, and I can remember now how I smiled to hear the laughter coming up to me. If the wine had poisoned him!" he groaned....

"He came to see us often after that. He was alone in the world and seemed to have such a good time with us that I was always glad to have him. I could see that Jacqueline liked him and that was enough for me. He never tired of thanking me for what I had done for him, and his face would light with pleasure whenever he saw me.

"How was I to suspect anything? As his visits became more frequent and my work grew more absorbing, I encouraged him to escort Jacqueline to the races and the other places of amusement of which she was always so fond. I seldom had time to go with her. But in spite of this friendship Jacqueline grew more affectionate to me every day and pleaded with me constantly to go about with her and let my work take care of itself. I showed her time and again how impossible this was, and then she would pout until Lescelles came, and I would tell him to take her somewhere.

"What a blind fool I was!" he cried with a harsh laugh. "I can see it all now. And what an actress she was! The more guilty she grew with Lescelles the more affection she displayed for me to prevent any hint of suspicion.

"One day I told her that I would be unusually busy—would dine at a café and would not be home until very late. But, as it happened, when I returned to my office after dinner, I found there was nothing of importance and so I went home."

He stopped again and the other could see that he was fighting to retain his composure as he reached the climax of the story. Noel did not speak or stir, but the hand that had but rested on the arm of the chair gripped it tightly.

"Noel!" There was unspeakable anguish in his voice. "Noel! In the blackness of these two years I've suffered so that I've sometimes wished that I had not gone home that night until I was expected! It was raining a little and when I reached the front door I let myself in without making any noise. I wanted to surprise Jacqueline and——Oh, God! I did—I did—I did!" And with a sobbing groan he sank into a chair and bowed his head on his arms.

It was a long time before he could continue, and when he began again his voice was hoarse with the effort he made to speak calmly.

"My friend, God grant that you may never know what I felt when I opened the door of the room where they were and found them—together! For you will never know till you have been—as I was! I think the shock must have unbalanced my mind in the moment that I saw them as I opened the door, for I leaned against the door-post and stared at them as if paralyzed. They leaped up and were staring back at me, and their faces—! They probably thought that I was enjoying a moment of bitter joy before I killed them both, and do you know what was passing in my mind? I was thinking that a chair just behind her was too close to the divan, and that if she leaned back in it, it would probably strike and scar the furniture. My mind refused to grasp the horror that my eyes had seen.

"And then in some dim, vague way the idea worked into my benumbed brain—I must shock them! I turned away from the door and stumble down the hall toward my study. I didn't have any desire to kill them in any way—at that moment I didn't even think that I ought to do it. But it seemed to me that I must kill them, and with a revolver—in the same way that a man would go through a distasteful social function.

"I was some little time finding my revolver, but that did not seem at the time to make any difference. I came back with it in my hand, fully expecting to find them there, waiting to be shot—but the room was empty!

"And then the paralysis passed from my brain and I went mad with fury. I rushed through every room in the house, cursing them at the top of my voice. Fortunately, none of the servants was at home.

"Then I ran bareheaded out into the rain and dashed down the street aimlessly, in the hope that I had taken the right direction and might come up with them. Before I had gone a hundred feet I ran into someone and nearly shot him accidentally. He yelled with fright and ran. I had just sense enough to put the revolver in my outside coat pocket, and with my hand still gripping it, I hurried on."

He paused again to mop his brow, but his voice I grew firmer and higher as the story of his wrongs worked him from grief to rage.

"I don't remember much of the rest of that night. I was only conscious of the rain on my face and that I was walking always at top speed without any goal. Now I was along the quays, then I remember peering into a few cafés. It seems to me that I was stopped several times by gendarmes, who released me when I showed them my card, but I never heard of it afterward. I think I passed through the Bois once, but when dawn came I was in some vile street in Montmartre. And with the daylight came some sort of calm.

"I started back toward my house, and after a short walk found a cab. In that drive I became, as I thought, complete master of myself again. I know now that I was practically a somnambulist. I thought the whole thing over in an almost impersonal way, and decided I would devote the rest of my life to vengeance. I would hunt both of them down and kill them, and I would begin the hunt systematically that day.

"When I reached home my clothes were soaking wet and my collar and necktie were gone. I had probably tom them off and thrown them away. Rose met me in the hall, and it did not strike me as being at all strange that she asked no questions. I went up to my room, took a bath and dressed in the most faultless style that my wardrobe would permit. With the pistol in my pocket I started, out again, first sending word that I would not, probably, be in my office for several days.

"All that day I haunted the cafés and clubs that I knew Lescelles frequented. I did not intend to kill him there unless he saw me. My plan was to follow him to whatever place he had taken Jacqueline, and kill them together.

"No one had seen him and I went home early in the morning, bitterly disappointed. I sat in my study most of the day planning, imagining, devising the most delightful ways in which to commit the double murder, as I did not intend to use the revolver unless it became necessary. The way that struck me as being best would be to find them asleep and waken them with one hand on the throat of each. Those throats haunted me. A dozen times that night I felt the joy of sinking my fingers into them, slowly squeezing out their lives as they stared up at me with eyes pleading for mercy.

"I was setting out again that evening when I met Rose a few steps outside my door. I think she was waiting for me—and she had the baby in her arms." His voice wavered and sank as if the rest were too terrible to tell.

"Noel," he went on at last in a strained, uncertain voice, "up to that moment I had not felt the slightest grief. I was apparently rational, but I was as insane as any man that ever lived. Fury and the lust of vengeance left no room for any other emotion. And," the voice dropped with horror until it was barely more than a hoarse whisper, "for a fraction of a moment I felt an impulse to kill the baby because it was hers!" Again he stopped, unable to go on. Noel could not repress a shudder but his hand shaded his features and he made no other sign that he had heard. Then Floriot spoke again.

"Noel! Noel!" he half-sobbed. "I thought the next moment that I was dying and—if it had only been true! For then for the first time came the realization of what I had lost. I must have staggered into my room and locked the door before I fainted, for light was coming in the window when I recovered consciousness and I was lying across my bed. With consciousness came the suffering hat has not ceased for two years!...

"I will not try to tell you what the next few days were. I lost track of time. I could not eat or drink or sleep. My revolver lay on the table and a dozen times I picked it up to blow out my brains, but the thought of the baby stopped me. I wept because I couldn't do it. She was so completely part of me that I did not see how I could live any longer.

"Finally, I made up my mind that no matter how dreary and empty my life might be, I must; live for the boy's sake, and with that resolution I locked up the revolver, burned every letter and photograph of her that I had, I held them in the fire, one by one, until the flames burned my fingers! Then I came into the world again.

"I fled to work like a man running away from something and the work brought—success! Success!"—And he ended with a grating laugh.

Then he turned his white, drawn face and feverish eyes on the still figure in the chair.

"Now," he demanded, "my friend, which of us deserves the most pity?"

[CHAPTER VI]

CLOSING FOR THE DEFENSE

A minute—two—minutes—passed but Noel gave no sign that he had heard the question. The hand that shaded the eyes prevented Floriot from finding in his face any clue to his thoughts. He turned away with a sigh that might have been weariness or disappointment or both and sank slowly into a chair.

At last Noel rose and shook himself slightly as if shaking off a hypnotic spell. His face was a little pale and his eyes had a queer look. He walked over and put his hand on his friend's arm.

"Floriot," he said, gently, "between us there need be no talk of sympathy. You know that I feel your pain almost as much as if it were mine. But I see this thing from a different angle. Even before I heard your story I understood, of course, that she was guilty of grave misconduct. But it seems to me that she has been punished enough—and she has repented!"

Floriot's only reply was an exclamation of scorn and contempt.

"Then why should she have come back?" asked Noel.

"I don't think I told you that her lover is dead," replied Floriot, bitterly. Then he straightened up determinedly: "She shall never come into this house again!"

"She's your wife!" said Noel calmly.

"I won't have her near the boy!"

"He's her boy, too! And whatever becomes of your boy's mother now, my friend, you can take the responsibility."

Floriot stared at him in astonishment and anger.

"I! Responsible! For her?" he exclaimed.

"Yes, you are responsible," was the firm reply. "Who knows what that poor woman may do now—after you have thrown her out!"

Floriot rose and burst out between anger and astonishment:

"Noel, what on earth is the matter with you? This woman has wrecked my home and ruined my life! Haven't I any rights? Wouldn't you have done what I did?"

"Your rights!" sneered his friend, with a scornful laugh. "Do you think that you have the right to sentence the mother of your boy to the life that she will have to lead now? Your own conscience must be singularly clear and your own life wonderfully blameless, my friend! Your rights! Humph! What about your duties? Did you look after your duties as faithfully as you are now looking out for your rights?

"Jacqueline was young and thoughtless—did you guide her and guard her? By your own story you threw her in the way of an attractive man so that you could shift some of your duties on to his shoulders!

"Did you study her heart? You expected her to make you happy—did you study her happiness?" he cried with bitter scorn. "Did you remember that she is far younger than you are? Did your age try to understand her youth and its needs?"

He paused. Floriot had sunk uncertainly back into his chair under the weight of this arraignment.

"You don' t answer! And because she—erred—because she has wounded your vanity by preferring—I'm not defending her!—by preferring another man to you when you did everything you could to make her do it, you throw her out and close your door against her! And you tell me you love her!"

"God knows I love her!" groaned Floriot.

Noel turned away with a short, scornful laugh.

"You loved her!" he exclaimed, contemptuously.

"Noel!"

Noel wheeled on him with flashing eyes.

"I say, it's not true!" he cried. "I tell you, you did not love her! Love is stronger than hate, for nothing can stop it! True love will trample down any obstacle to pardon, to sacrifice! And no one who has not suffered can be sure that he has loved. No, my friend," he went on more calmly, "you didn't love Jacqueline. You loved her grace and her beauty and her charm but it did not blind you to her weakness! If you had really loved her she could have done you no irreparable wrong; for, even when she made this mistake, your love would have found an excuse!"

Floriot sprang up with an angry protest.

"No, no!" he cried. "Any man in the same place would have done what I did! You would—what would you do?"

Noel hesitated a moment. "I don't know——exactly—what I should do," he replied gravely, "because I am a man with a man's limitations. But I know what you ought to do!"

"I will never forgive her! I——"

"Listen to me a minute, Louis!" interrupted his friend, sternly. "Jacqueline is the mother of your son. He is her child and you have dared to separate them for life! Instead of holding out a helping hand to her, you have thrown her out of your house! You might have saved her from her future and you have given her the first push down the hill that leads—we both know where! Wait! Listen to me! You are a public servant. When you plead against a criminal you ask for a verdict and a sentence in proportion to the crime committed. Your wife loved you and gave you a son. She sinned against you and is sorry for her sin, and yet"—his voice rose with bitter passion—"and yet you have sentenced her to misery, despair and death!"

A growing fright was driving the angry gleam from Floriot's eyes as he raised his hand in protest.

"No! No! I——" he began in an altered voice.

"Yes! Yes!" broke in his friend. "What will she do? What will become of her? Have you ever thought of that? She will have a dozen lovers, will she? Who will be responsible? Have you ever thought of that?

"You have not! I can see it in your face! And I suppose you consider yourself an honorable man, a model husband, a blameless father! If you won't do your duty, Floriot, by the living God! I'll do it for you!"

Floriot started up and moved toward his friend with queer, halting steps.

"What—do—you—mean?" came from his lips in barely more than a whisper.

Noel looked squarely into his eyes.

"I mean that your wife shall find in my house the place that you refuse her! My life shall be hers—and I will ask nothing in exchange!"

Floriot halted and stiffened and for a dozen seconds the two men gazed into each other's eyes. Then Floriot spoke slowly and coldly:

"It seems to me, Noel, that you are presuming little beyond the privilege of even a friend."

"In this case I have more than the privilege—of a friend!" was the calm reply, with a note of meaning in the voice.

Floriot continued to stare at him with a mixture of wonder and resentment. Then a sudden thought made him catch his breath with a sharp hiss. His figure relaxed and he took a half-step forward.

"Noel! ... Noel!" he gasped. "Jacqueline! ... She was the woman—you loved!"

The blue eyes did not waver.

"Yes, it was Jacqueline! And," he added, bitterly, "I loved her better, if not more, than you did!..."

In the nerve-wracking night Floriot had exhausted, he thought, every emotion. This last shock numbed him. He groped his way to a chair and with both hands to his head tried to collect his wandering mind and grasp the meaning of Noel's admission.

Noel had loved Jacqueline! This was the woman for whom he had tried to kill himself! His brain reeled dizzily and he stared down at the carpet with unseeing eyes. It put his friend in a strange and almost incomprehensible light. All that he had said and done now took on a different aspect. Noel had loved her! He still loved her and defended her! All that his friend had said, all that Jacqueline had said, his talk with Madame Varenne—all swept back over him with a new meaning! Was he wrong? Should he have obeyed the impulse to forgive when she sobbed at his feet—the impulse that he strangled almost at the cost of reason?... Noel was speaking but he barely heard the words.

"I loved her for years before your marriage," he was saying. "Many and many a time I made up my mind to speak to her but—I loved her more than I could tell her! I was afraid to risk everything on a word. Again and again I went away on my long wanderings, trying to show myself that I wanted nothing more than my freedom. The farther I traveled from St. Pierre the more miserable I grew and I always came back more in love than ever."

There was no grief or pain in his voice. He was still the judge denouncing the culprit.

"Then I began to think that she was falling in love with you! I tried again to take my life in my hands and to tell her I loved, but I couldn't. I ran away again, and this time I made up my mind that I would never come back. I got as far as Messina and bought my ticket for the next east-bound P. & O. Then I deliberately missed the boat and the next one. I couldn't drag myself up the gangplank!

"The next day, without hardly knowing how it happened, I found myself in the railway station, on my way back to France. I had nearly reached her house when I heard of your betrothal!"

He paused for a moment and eyed his friend's bowed figure.

"I suppose you wonder, Louis, why I was not more completely overcome and horrified by your story of your madness. My madness carried me a little farther. I, too, sat up in my room with a revolver one night trying to decide whether I should kill you or myself or both of us!"

Floriot gave no sign that he had heard.

"The old Padre told me once when I was a boy," he went on in the same bitter tone, "there is a line somewhere in the holy writings which says, 'Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.' But his friend ought to show that he appreciates the sacrifice!" He paused again for a moment.

"If I had dreamed," he said with stem calmness, "that Jacqueline would be where she is to-night, I would have killed you, my friend, before I tried to kill myself!"

The voice ceased abruptly and Noel turned slowly away. The silence seemed to stir Floriot more than the lashing words. He raised his head wearily.

"What do you think I ought to do?"

"Do! Do!" cried Noel, wheeling, his face blazing with scorn. He walked quickly to the door and paused with his hand on the knob. "I am going to find Jacqueline! Are you coming with me?"

Floriot rose unsteadily—doubt, dread and the faint promise of returning hope in his face. He moved uncertainly over toward his friend with hand outstretched. Noel seized it in an eager, painful grip and they looked into each other's eyes with trembling lips.

Then, without a word, they passed down the hall and out of the house.

[CHAPTER VII]

THE WANDERERS

You will find in the chronicle of Matthew of Paris (and a reference to it somewhere in the Apocrypha) a legend of a Jew who refused a resting place on the bench by his door to the Friend of the World as He passed on His way to Calvary. And as He walked on He said:

"I go to My rest in My Father's house but thou shalt wander o'er the earth till I come again."

Many great writers have loved to believe the strange old tale, and it has been immortalized in prose and verse.

As the curse was launched, try to imagine that the ancient Jew felt in his heart a great dread and unrest, and he rose from the seat that he denied the Saviour and struck out across the desert.

Then—who knows?—for his further punishment the wind piled sand-dunes in his path, and as he toiled over them new ones rose, and ever in the form of the Cross. The palm trees were as crosses through the heat-haze. A hundred times he was near death from thirst and heat but he could not die.

And when he came to the mountains the torrents were crosses and the snow drifts and the crags. He turned and sought death in the frozen North and the icebergs rose in cold and shining crosses. And southward in the trackless jungles, in the creepers at his feet and the vines overhead he saw the sign of him who walked on to Calvary.

Wandering over the face of the earth in suffering of the body and misery of the soul, praying daily for the death that is denied him, he must go on and on, and always about his path the hated symbol of his curse.

Louis Floriot thought often of the queer old legend in the dark years that followed that night in the house at Passy. Some one once said that the greatest hell on earth is reserved for the man who returns to his empty house from his wife's funeral and begins to ask himself whether he was or was not responsible for her death. But there is one even more terrible than that—believing that he is in a large measure responsible for her shame. And Louis Floriot stretched himself on that bed of torture every night of his life.

When he and Noel set out on their search they fully expected to find her within forty-eight hours at the longest. They learned at the Passy station that a woman answering Jacqueline's description had taken a train for Paris a short time before they arrived! so that simplified the hunt. They roamed through the cafés of the better sort and examined the registers of the larger hotels all through the night, planning to get help in the morning.

There was one dread in the hearts of both that neither dared speak until after daylight. They had found no clue after seeing the man at the Passy station, and when they took breakfast together they were avoiding each other's eyes as they talked.

Floriot would not eat, but his friend insisted that he drink several cups of coffee and two small glasses of brandy. When he saw his eye brighten and a faint touch of color return to his pale cheeks, Noel suggested as gently as possible:

"There is one more place that we ought to visit before we do anything else, Louis."

Floriot glanced at him with questioning dread. Noel read his thoughts and nodded.

"I don't think she would do it—as long—as long—as the boy is alive, and I don't want to alarm you needlessly. But we might as well be sure," he continued.

Both had feared all night that when Jacqueline reached Paris and realized that she was alone! in the world with no place to go and no one to turn to for aid, comfort or advice, she might have thrown herself in the Seine. They were going to the morgue to see if her body had been found.

They walked through the rows of the silent figures wrapped in white sheets, and as the face of every woman was uncovered, Floriot gave a gasp and closed his eyes before he dared to look. The body they dreaded to find was not there, and they silently thanked God as they came out into the sunlight again.

Then they hastily formed a plan of campaign. Noel went out to the house in Passy to get a photograph of Jacqueline that he had in his bag. It was six years old, but it was better than none. He was to meet Floriot at the office of the Chief of the Parisian police.

The chief knew the young Deputy Attorney very well, and had a deep admiration and respect for him. He did not ask any useless or embarrassing questions when Floriot told him what he wanted. Being a good policeman he already knew much of the private life of the man, and it was easy for him to fill in the gaps in Floriot's story. Noel returned with the photograph and he promised that he would have a number of reproductions made and put his best men on the search.

Leaving the office of the police chief they made the rounds of all the hospitals without learning anything of a woman answering Jacqueline's description. Then Noel insisted that they could do nothing more that day and that they had better go out to Passy, have a good dinner and a night's rest.

All the way home, at dinner, and throughout the evening Noel talked to his friend with a buoyancy he did not feel. As the day wore on he realized what a task they had undertaken, and already he began to feel that if they succeeded in finding her it must be due more to chance than otherwise. But he had no idea of abandoning the search. In his heart he told himself that he would devote his life to it if necessary.

And Floriot? Like the Jew of the legend the spirit of unrest had already entered his soul. He made a hundred vain and impracticable suggestions in the course of the evening, each one involving useless activity on the part of himself and his friend. But the manifest futility of adopting any of his plans did not weigh with him. He wanted to be doing something. Noel finally drugged him with Burgundy and persuaded him to go to bed with many assurances that the Chief would have her or be on the trail in the morning.

"Noel, old man, I don't want to sleep!" was his last protest. "What do you think about going, as I suggested, down to——"

"Tut! Tut!" interrupted Noel, testily. "What have you employed the police for? Go to sleep, old man! It'll be all right by to-morrow night!"

And with a final hand-shake he left him.

In spite of his protest that he did not want to sleep, a mine explosion would not have stirred Floriot two minutes after he touched the bed. Exhausted Nature seized the opportunity to make up for the drains of more than two weeks, and he was still sleeping heavily when Noel came to call him shortly after noon.

"I've just come from the Chief's office," said Noel, brightly, after he had listened to and put aside Floriot's reproaches for not calling him. He did not mention that he had been to the morgue again.

"And what does he say?" demanded the other sitting up with eager anxiety. Noel avoided his eyes.

"He hasn't anything definite to report but he assures me that it is only a question of hours," he replied, cheerfully. "He has telegraphed to the frontiers and all the seaports, and unless Jacqueline has left France we have her just as surely as if she were in the next room now!"

"Left France! She can't have done that!" exclaimed Floriot.

"It's hardly possible in that length of time," agreed the other, "and for that reason I think that our friend the chief will have news for us by to-morrow night—sure!"

But there was no news "to-morrow night" nor the next night. The nights grew to weeks and the weeks to months and the months to years, and there was never a trace of the missing woman from the moment she left the Passy station.

Noel, true to the vow he had sworn the day after she left, spent his life in the search for her. He had ample funds, and Floriot was well provided for in the goods of the world. All the capitals of Europe and the larger cities he searched, aided by the police. He made friends with the demi-monde and the "submerged" of many races. The painted women of St. Petersburg and the belles of, the Tenderloin knew him equally well. But it! was all in vain. Jacqueline had disappeared.

Floriot could not abandon his work, for the sake of his boy, but he took from it all the time that he could spare. He labored now without soul and without ambition. The one thing in his life that seemed worth while was to find his wife.

He and Noel wrote to each other constantly when the latter was away—advising, suggesting, planning. All the time that he could take from the courts he employed in roaming about Europe while Noel was on the other side of the world. And like the sign of the cross to the ancient Jew, a hundred times a year he thought that in the glimpse of a profile or the sound of a woman's voice behind him, he had reached the end of his quest. And each disappointment was more bitter than the last.

Even in his home there was no escape. For as Raymond grew up it became more evident every year that his dark, passionate eyes, smooth forehead and dark curly hair were his mother's. The firmly cut jaw and mouth and straight, high-bred nose came from his father.

He was growing into a splendid young man, as clean mentally as he was physically. He was the one joy of his father's life and he tried to make up in his love what the boy missed in not having the mother that had been driven away.

He had an inherited taste for the law and at school he was a source of constant pride to his father. He was prouder when the young man—just turned twenty-four—was admitted to practice in the courts of France.

Floriot had been transferred from Paris to Dijon and from there to Bordeaux. He was appointed President of the Toulouse Court just before Raymond became a full-fledged advocate. This made it necessary for father and son to part because the son could not practise in his father's court. It was therefore decided that Raymond should remain in Bordeaux with Rose as housekeeper. She had been the nurse of the boy's babyhood, had raised him, and grown gray hair in the service. She was a fixture for life in the Floriot establishment.

About this time two men who had never even heard of any of the characters in this story-excepting M. Floriot, for whom they entertained a marked respect and hearty dislike, although he did not know of their existence—sat down one morning and wrote a letter, the effect of which was far beyond their foresight or wildest imaginings.

[CHAPTER VIII]

"CONFIDENTIAL MISSIONS"

It was nearly twenty years after the disappearance of Jacqueline that M. Robert Henri Perissard and his very dear confrère, M. Modiste Hyacinthe Merivel, reached their office in a little street not very far from the Palace of Justice, about nine o'clock in the morning, as was their custom.

They always took a cab in going to and from their place of business for the same reason that the cab never took them to the door of their residence. And, for the same reason, their residence was in one of the worst streets of Montmartre. One maintained an address in the Rue Fribourg and the other in Rue St. Denis, but neither could ever be found there.

Their little home was beautifully furnished, but it was on the top floor of a squalid-looking building, and scarcely a soul in the world besides themselves knew that they lived there. They did not look at all like residents of the vilest quarter of Paris. In fact, their appearance was so blamelessly respectable that it would have aroused the suspicions of a clever policeman.

All this may seem strange, but in their relation to society it was quite necessary. It was their mission in life to avenge all transgressions of the laws of God and man. They ferreted out evildoing that escaped or was not punishable by the police, and heavily fined the evildoers. It was a lucrative business, but they dared not live up to anything like the full strength of their income. It would attract too much attention, and gentlemen who engage in that business always shrink from notoriety. As it is, they are frequently found in queer places decorated with bullet holes or knife wounds of great merit.

Then, besides, the natural guardians of the community—the police—are frequently brutal enough to call them "blackmailers" and send them to prison for long terms. So you can see that only gentlemen of great caution and perspicacity can ply the trade successfully.

M. Perissard, the elder of the two, had in conversation a mixture of pomposity and unction that was truly edifying.

He was about medium height with a rotund figure, bald head, bushy side-whiskers and little porcine eyes in a fat face. If you were not a close observer of men you would have taken him for a prosperous banker.

His companion, M. Merivel, was the larger and younger man. He affected an even more subdued and painfully respectable garb. He had oily black hair and heavy jowls. He was gifted with a deep heavy voice, though not so glib a tongue, but it was most impressive to hear him back up his co-worker's statements with rumbling affirmatives.

The commodities in which they dealt are not hard to come by—especially in Continental Europe. There is scarcely a wealthy family that has not some secret that it would rather the world did not know. For men with the shrewdness and insight of Messrs. Perissard and Merivel a whisper, a breath, was enough. A patient and careful system of espionage and research and a little judicious bribing of servants and, lo! The thing was done!

Lately their business had been remarkably successful and was spreading rapidly—so rapidly that they had found it necessary to take in another man to look after their interests in Lyons, where they had two or three "most promising affairs," as M. Merivel would have put it. And now they felt the need of a shrewd man in Bordeaux—shrewd and courageous, for they had laid out a "mission" there that was so dangerous that neither cared to handle it in person, and yet so lucrative that it could not be abandoned.

The man in Lyons had proved that he was just the genius needed there and the partners feared that they should "never look upon his like again." For weeks they had gone over the field of reckless and unscrupulous blackguards whom they knew—and knew to be at that time out of prison—but they could not fix upon one who, they were sure, had the ability and the loyalty combined.

It was in this dilemma that M. Perissard began opening the morning's mail, sighing heavily, while his associate busied himself with a collection of society papers from various capitals in the hope of unearthing a profitable hint of threatened scandal.

The first letter was from the editor of a black-mailing weekly who received commissions on all of his "tips" that developed into financial gain for the firm of "Perissard and Merivel, Confidential Missions." It contained the information that a certain Marquise had gone into a secluded part of Switzerland "for her health" and was very anxious to maintain the utmost secrecy, as it was well known that her husband had been in the Far East for more than a year.

M. Perissard put the letter carefully to one side of his desk and picked up the next, which bore a queer-looking South American stamp. He opened it and glanced over the two sheets of notepaper that it contained, and as he read his face expressed a grateful and uplifting joy.

"My dear Merivel!" he exclaimed. "Our problem is solved! The—veree—thing!"

M. Merivel ponderously folded his paper and turned a look of heavy inquiry on his associate.

"Indeed!" he rumbled.

"True! my dear friend, true!" M. Perissard assured him, joyously. "Listen!" And this is what he read:

Café Libertad, Buenos Ayres, Feb. 11th.

My Revered Preceptor:

You will no doubt be surprised to hear from me, and especially in this God-forsaken place, but here I am without exactly knowing how I got here. Furthermore, now that I am here and have been here for some weeks, I don't see how I am going to live much longer.

South America is a great place for government officials and cattle raisers. Cattle thieves, I am told, do rather well, too, but none of these three lines of occupation is open to me. I haven't the influence for the first, the capital for the second or the inclination for the third. It is bourgeois, and it is well for us of the upper classes to keep our hands clean of vulgar theft. The more gentlemanly forms of acquiring mentionable sums are practically useless. These people of Latin America have the suspicious nature of all provincials; and, as most of them chat about their family scandals in the cafés, it is not a fruitful field for a discreet young man with a keen scent. The very wealthy are usually investing in revolutions, and I have no vocation for that form of promoting.

All this, my dear teacher, is simply a prelude to the information that I want to get back to La Belle France—want to very badly. If you can find something for me to do and want me badly enough to pay my passage, I will take the first ship that sails. You can reach me at the above address, unless a certain yellow-skinned suitor of one of the ladies at the café knifes me before I hear from you. Believe me to be yours dutifully,

FREDERIC LAROQUE.

M. Perissard read and M. Merivel heard this flippant letter without the trace of a smile. They were serious-minded folk. "Confidential missions" have the effect of dwarfing the sense of humor, and they had been in the profession for many years.

"A-ahem!" said M. Merivel heavily. "And this Frederic Laroque—-?

"He is a young man who was a clerk in my office before we became partners, my dear Merivel," explained M. Perissard, smiling happily. "He displayed a singular aptitude for our work but——Youth! Youth!" He shook his head. "He would not stay with me as I advised. He insisted on going his own way and I lost sight of him in a short time. I am really surprised that he is not in prison, but it shows that he must have developed as I knew that he would. His hardships in the New World probably have had the needed subduing effect. And now he is an instrument made to our hand! Thoroughly loyal to his friend or employer he always was, I assure you, my dear Merivel, and without fear—without fear absolutely! Oh, it is providential! Providential!" and he raised his hands piously.

"Most providential!" echoed M. Merivel in rolling thunder. Then he added: "You are certain, my dear Robert, that the young man is trustworthy? You remember that Guadin was also fearless!"

"Oh, quite so! Quite so, my dear friend!" his confrère hastened to assure him. "He is the soul of honor! He would not think of attempting anything dishonest with me!"

"In that case," came from the depths of M. Merivel's chest, "I think that we would do well to send him the money."

"Just what I was going to propose the moment I finished his letter!" declared M. Perissard.

So the letter was written and a postal order for a thousand francs enclosed. Laroque was requested to meet M. Perissard at the Hotel of the Three Crowns in Bordeaux as soon as he could get there.

Some three weeks later M. Frederic Laroque, accompanied by the lady of the Café Libertad, walked up the gangplank of the "Amazon," bound for France, while on the pier, Manuel Silvas blasphemed the Virgin because he was armed only with a knife; and Laroque had carelessly dropped his hand on his pistol pocket as he passed.

[CHAPTER IX]

THE HOTEL OF THE THREE CROWNS

Marie, the pretty chambermaid of the Hotel of the Three Crowns, was visibly nervous one misty day in April. She could not be kept away from the front door, which opened on a dingy street a few minutes' walk from the railway station.

Not that there was any particular reason why she should not be there. The guests of the Hotel of the Three Crowns were late risers as a rule. It was too early to set about her duties, and in the meantime the proprietor would rather have had her at the front door than anywhere else, for we have mentioned the fact that she was pretty, and that made her the only attractive feature about the front of the down-at-heel little inn. Transients of the commercial traveler type were seldom known to walk past the door if they caught a glimpse of Marie.

It was for one of these gentlemen that Marie was so anxiously waiting, and her nervousness was due to the fact that her husband, Victor, the "boots" of the hotel, was roaming around in the background. He was as simple-minded and unattractive as a husband ought to be. Whenever his intellect tried to grasp anything beyond the mysteries of cleaning shoes and carrying trunks it ran into heavy opaque obstructions.

Marie might have carried on a dozen flirtation under his very chin and he would have been none the wiser. But she had never done it, because of her naturally clean morals. So now, that she was preparing to inflict on him the greatest wrong that she had in her power to commit, she felt the trepidation that always precedes the first plunge into crime.

In spite of the wrought-up condition of her mind she could not help observing curiously a queer-looking pair that alighted from a cab in front of the door. The man was a tall, rather slender but muscular man of thirty-five or past with sandy hair, a bold chin and sparkling pale gray eyes that ran over her trim figure and pretty face with undisguised pleasure. It was his dress that most attracted her attention. He wore a long, check traveling coat of rough English cloth and soft gray hat, patent-leather shoes with singularly high heels, brown and very baggy "peg-top" trousers. His open coat and overcoat disclosed a gray silk shirt and loose black tie. But the really bizarre feature of the costume was a broad red sash about the waist in place of the conventional belt or braces.

The woman, his companion, was rather flashily dressed in clothes that bore the marks of travel and long wear. She was small and might once have been pretty. She was now plainly past forty and looked all of it. Her figure still retained suggestions of a departed grace. Her hair was dark and wavy but it was cut short, and she had dark, unnaturally bright eyes. Even Marie knew enough of the world to place her at once in a calling that is older than the profession of arms. In her face, glance and walk she bore the brand that Nature places on those who "eat the bread of infamy and take the wage of shame." But what Marie did not understand was the unearthly, almost translucent, pallor of her face and the peculiar delicacy of the pouches under the eyes—the hall-marks of the drug slave.

The man dropped a large traveling bag on the sidewalk and then helped the driver of the cab unship a small and much battered trunk. The woman eyed the proceedings listlessly. Then he turned to Marie with a breezy smile.

"Well, my dear, have you a room to spare and some strong and willing young man to help me carry this trunk up to it?" he asked. On being addressed, the maid started and then smiled sweetly.

"Oh, yes, monsieur! I think there is still a vacant room. Victor! Victor!" she called, turning her head to the doorway. In a few moments her husband shambled out. He had a placid, gently inquiring expression that made his face resemble nothing so much as that of a good-natured horse.

"Just give me a lift with this trunk, my man," commanded the guest, briskly, as Victor came down the steps. The procession streamed into the house, leaving Marie still on guard at the door, much to the gentleman's regret. Victor showed the way up two flights of stairs to a rather large room under the roof. It contained one big bed, two small tables, a dressing-case and several chairs. The porter, in a slow drawl, pointed out that one of the most stylish features of the apartment was a small dressing-room that opened off it. The walls and low ceiling were kalsomined. The floor was stained with cheap paint and a few cheaper rugs were scattered about.

A step or two inside the door the man stopped, looked around and laughed.

"H'm! I've seen better!" he remarked.

"It's the only one we've got left, monsieur," drawled Victor.

"Not a palace, is it?" he went on, turning to his companion. She shrugged her shoulders slightly.

"Oh, what does it matter? This room or any other!" she replied, and the indifference of tone and words matched the weariness of her manner and the carelessness of her tawdry attire.

"Well, I don't suppose we shall be here long," said her companion.

He and Victor carried the luggage into the dressing-room.

The woman took off her hat and cloak, put the former on the dresser, threw the latter carelessly across a chair and dropped wearily into another.

"Oh, I'm tired!" she sighed.

"Has anyone inquired for M. Laroque—Frederic Laroque?" the man was asking as he came back with Victor. The porter handed him a card.

"This gentleman called about an hour ago," he replied. Laroque glanced at it.

"Perissard," he nodded, half to himself.

"He said he'd come back in about an hour," he drawled.

"All right! Show him up when he does," he ordered briskly, taking off his coat and overcoat.

"Can I get you anything, monsieur?"

"A bottle of absinthe!" was the prompt reply.

"Yes, monsieur."

"And some cigarettes."

"Yes, monsieur." And, the guest adding nothing further to the order, he shuffled out and slowly closed the door. Laroque looked again at the card that he still held in his hand.

"I wonder what that old devil is up to now!" he murmured, thoughtfully. He had been wondering ever since he received the letter and the thousand francs. The woman did not hear him; or, if she did, paid no attention.

"This is better than the ship, anyhow, isn't it?" she remarked from the depths of the big armchair. Laroque was busily emptying his pockets on to the top of the dresser. As he took out the pistol he thought of Senor Silvas and smiled.

"Yes!" he declared emphatically, "I've had enough of the sea for a long time. You ought to be glad to be back again; you were certainly anxious to see 'la belle France,' weren't you?"

"I've been away from it for twenty—twenty years!" said the woman in a low voice.

"I shouldn't wonder if you found a change or two," he suggested pleasantly, marching into the dressing-room to "wash up." She sighed wearily.

"I don't suppose I'll find any changes greater than those in myself."

"Because you have your hair cut short?" came from the dressing-room with a laugh. "People often have their hair cut short for all sorts of reasons. Typhoid fever is better than most. And I rather like your short curly hair. You look like a boy, dressed up!"

"I'm not thinking of my hair," she returned wearily. "I'm thinking of what I was twenty years ago when I left France and what I am to-day."

"If it hurts you to think of it, my girl, don't think of it!" he suggested lightly, appearing at the door with a towel in his hands.

"I suppose you are right—perhaps that is the better way," was the reply in world-weary tones.

"Of course, it is!" he assured her cheerfully. "What's done can't be undone, old girl. There are lots of women more to be pitied than you are."

"I wonder!" she murmured, with a faint bitter smile.

"To begin with," he went on, vigorously polishing his nails on his trouser legs, "you are the only woman I have loved for the last six months! That ought to count for something, oughtn't it?"

"Twenty years ago!" she repeated more to herself than to him. "I was young and pretty then."

"Oh, you look all right by gaslight now!" he assured her.

"I had a husband and child," she went on without heeding. "Now, I am alone—with nothing left!"

"And what about me, pray!" he protested with a laugh. "Don't I count for something?"

"Oh, shut up!" she snapped, pettishly. "I don't want to play the fool to-day!"

"So I see," retorted Laroque, with an ironical bow. "Madame has her nerves, has she?"

"To-day I'm sick of everything," she continued drearily. "Life disgusts me. I'd sell mine for a centime!"

"Oh, it's worth more than that! Now, buck up!" he cried, cheerfully. "I quite understand that you used to be a rich woman and now you are not, but everyone has his ups and downs. Look at me! I used to be a lawyer's clerk—old Perissard's clerk—and look at me now! Take the times as they come, old girl, and money when you can get your hands on it! That's my motto—money's the only thing that matters!"

She turned her head slowly toward him with a contemptuous look.

"Oh, I know you'd do anything for money!"

M. Laroque shrugged his shoulders.

"Better that than do nothing and get nothing for it," he replied with light philosophy, taking a chair at the opposite side of the table.

Victor entered with bottle of absinthe and the cigarettes and deposited them carefully between them. Laroque rubbed his hands together and gazed at the bottle with glistening eyes.

"Good!" he exclaimed, enthusiastically. "Now, mix up the drinks, old girl, and put some power in 'em! You want yours about as badly as I want mine!"

The woman uncorked the bottle and began preparing the absinthe while he lighted a cigarette and turned to Victor, who stood stolidly by the table.

"What's going on in Bordeaux?" he asked pleasantly. "Is there any fun?"

Victor studied the question gravely and then drawled:

"Well, it's amusing sometimes, then sometimes it isn't."

Laroque's clear laugh rang out.

"Now, we know all about it, don't we?"

Victor stared at him with the mild gaze of a surprised cow. He did not see the joke and didn't feel up to the mental effort of looking for it.

"Will you dine at the table d'hôte?" he inquired.

"What's the cooking like?" Again Victor pondered for several moments.

"Well," he drawled at last, "some people say it's good and then—some people say it isn't."

Again Laroque roared with laughter.

"Well, you are a mine of information, aren't you?" he shouted. Victor did not acknowledge the compliment.

"Dinner's at seven," he announced solemnly.

"Right!"

"If you want anything, ring once for me and twice for the chambermaid."

"Thank you, my lord!" bowed Laroque.

"Shall I take away the absinthe?" he asked, as the woman slowly put the bottle down when enough of the milky fluid had dripped slowly into, the tumblers. The other quickly put out a restraining hand.

"Nay, nay, my lord!" he replied, firmly. "Never remove a bottle until it's empty!"

"It makes no difference to me, monsieur."

"Just what I thought!" was the retort. "But it makes a good deal of difference to me!" And as Victor slowly slouched out he picked up one of the tumblers with trembling hands and took a sip.

"Great! Great!" he murmured, closing his eyes in ecstasy.

"Yes, it is good, isn't it?" And the woman took a long drink.

"It's a marvel! A marvel! There's nothing you do better than an absinthe! Light up, old girl and let's be happy!"

She lighted a cigarette, and for several minutes they smoked and sipped in silence.

"Are we going to stay here long?" she asked at last, in a tone that implied that it made no difference to her whether they did or not.

"I don't know," he replied, passing over his empty glass as she began laying the foundations of another drink. "That depends on Perissard. I must have a chat with him before I can say."

"Who is Perissard?" she inquired indifferently.

"I told you I used to be his clerk. He's a lawyer!"

"What sort of a man is he?"

"Oh, he's a clever old devil!" smiled Laroque. "He knows the Code Napoleon backwards! When I wrote to him I thought to myself, 'There's a postage stamp wasted, for Perissard has either retired from business or he's making felt shoes in prison somewhere, unless he's flirting with the dusky native ladies of New Caledonia.' But I was wrong, you see, for he's not in prison, says he's glad to hear from me and sends me a thousand francs to pay my passage. That knocked me edgewise! The old fox certainly needs me for something. He doesn't spend a thousand francs for nothing!"

"Be careful!" she warned him, but the tone was a mockery of the words.

"Don't worry!" he replied jauntily. "I'll keep my eyes open and——" a knock at the door interrupted him. "There he is now, I guess. Come in!" he called, turning his head toward the door. It was opened quickly and with brisk step, M. Perissard, closely followed by his associate in "Confidential missions," bustled in.

[CHAPTER X]

THE USES OF ADVERSITY

"My dear Laroque!" exclaimed M. Perissard, effusively holding out his hand as the adventurer advanced to meet him.

"Well! How are you, monsieur?" returned the ether, cordially shaking his hand. "By heaven! You've put on flesh, haven't you?"

M. Perissard laughed.

"Ah! I put most of that on with my clothes every morning," he explained with a wink of elephantine slyness.

"Every morning! What on earth for?" demanded Laroque, blankly.

"Thin people do not inspire confidence," declared M. Perissard, impressively, but still smiling. "Fat people do!" Then he noticed the woman in the chair and evolved an elaborate bow, seconded by M. Merivel. "Madame!"

"My life's companion—for the last six months," said Laroque, with flippant irony and an introductory wave of his hand. The partners bowed once more in unison and the woman acknowledged the introduction with a perfunctory nod, the absinthe and cigarette immediately reclaiming her attention.

"Let me present M. Merivel," said Perissard, suavely. "Formerly a schoolmaster, but now my friend and associate!"

"Delighted!" exclaimed Laroque, squeezing a limp, mushy hand, "But, sit down! Sit down!"

All three took chairs, the visitors carefully placing their silk hats on the floor beside them.

"And first let me thank you," he went on addressing himself to the older man, "to begin with——"

"For the thousand francs I sent you?"

"Yes," nodded Laroque. M. Perissard smiled.

"When I received your letter it struck me that you were not exactly rolling in money," he said with ponderous playfulness.

"I wasn't—exactly!" laughed the young man.

"So I thought it was well to send you a little on account," continued M. Perissard.

"And supposing I had put the money in my pocket and remained in South America?"

"I should have lost my thousand francs. But I wasn't afraid of that," his prospective employer assured him. "I knew you too well, Laroque. I knew you to be too—too——"

"Too honest?" grinned the adventurer.

"Too intelligent," corrected M. Perissard, "to do such a foolish thing. What are a thousand francs," with an expressive sweep of his arm, "in the position I am going to offer you!"

"As good as that, eh?" There was an eager gleam in his eyes.

"Ask M. Merivel!" said the senior partner bowing toward his friend.

M. Merivel, thus appealed to, delivered his first contribution to the chat in an unctuous bass.

"A first class position! Most admirable!" "Well! That sounds interesting!" and Laroque hitched his chair a little nearer.

The woman had just finished concocting a third glass of absinthe and now she rose with:

"I'll leave you to your business talk and go and unpack the trunk."

"Yes, do, my girl!" nodded her "life's companion," and she passed out with the drink and the package of cigarettes.

"Now then, to business!" said M. Perissard in slightly crisper tones when the door had closed.

"Right!"

"To begin with, I'm no longer a lawyer," declared M. Perissard.

"So I see," nodded Laroque. "According to your card you are now a Notary Public." His eyes twinkled.

Messrs. Perissard and Merivel laughed at the same moment and for precisely the same length of time. The Siamese Twins were in constant discord compared with these two.

"That's to inspire confidence," explained the senior partner.

"I see! Like this!" chuckled the adventurer sticking his finger into M. Perissard's paunch.

"Ah, yes!" rumbled M. Merivel, rolling his eyes up piously and clasping his hands, "Confidence is such a be—u—tiful thing in these days of disrespect! Alas! To-day respect is rapidly disappearing. The young have ceased to respect the old and the family solicitor no longer holds the proud position that was his. 'Where are the snows of yesteryear'?"

Laroque listened to this speech with a grin that indicated an utter absence of the virtue the decline of which struck M. Merivel as so exceedingly deplorable.

"By Jove! He talks well, doesn't he?" he exclaimed.

"Like a book!" declared M. Perissard in a hoarse but enthusiastic whisper. "But to resume," he added in his "business" voice, "I'm in business now."

"What sort of business?" inquired the adventurer.

"Business of all kinds. I refuse no business!"

"With money in it," amended M. Merivel, in a thunderous aside.

"But we deal principally in the faults, vices and weakness of our fellow men," continued the senior partner.

"Sounds like a good trade!" commented Laroque, heartily, his lips twitching, as he glanced from one to the other.

"And a most moral one!" came unctuously from the unsounded depths of M. Merivel's chest, "For we do good with the Strong Hand, you see. Ah-utile dulci—the Latin—ahem!"

"I don't altogether get you," said the young man, crossing one knee over the other with the air of a man who has made up his mind not to understand hints. M. Perissard shifted his chair a little, cleared his throat and leaned forward with his hands on his thighs.

"You shall!" he declared, a little more of the "stagey" quality was missing in his voice. "There are very few houses without a skeleton in the closet."

"Skeletons are cheap to-day!" struck in M. Merivel's bass.

"And in the best families there are often secrets which are worth a fortune," continued M. Perissard, impressively.

Laroque's eye-brows went up.

"O, I see," he said a trifle coolly, "Blackmail!"

Four large fat hands went up simultaneously in a gesture of horror and two shocked voices burst forth as one.

"Sh—h—h! My dear young friend! What an ugly word!"

"We are humble helpers in the cause of justice! Most ugly word!"

"Find it rather dangerous, don't you?" pursued Laroque in the same tone.

"We do not!" came the reply in chorus, baritone and bass.

"Pays, does it?"

Again the four plump hands went up.

"Pay! My dear Laroque, I should think it did!" cried Perissard. "You will very soon find out for yourself how well it pays for I propose paying you—in addition to your salary—ten per cent upon the profits! You won't find it hard work and you won't find it difficult. Quickness, discretion and tact are all that are required. I know you pretty well, my dear friend. You are intelligent and energetic and I'm sure you are honest! Not too scrupulously so at all times—but—ah—you understand!"

"Scruples are out of date," groaned M. Merivel, shaking his head gloomily, "Ne quid nimis—the Latin again—ahem!"

"And you are fond of money!" went on the spokesman.

Laroque smiled and nodded.

"Well, then! You shall have the money!" declared M. Perissard. Word, look and tone were those of a true philanthropist.

"It's a tempting offer," admitted the adventurer rubbing his chin, reflectively; "but, you know, I was sometime getting out of——It has not been many years since I was in trouble and I don't want any more trouble if I can help it."

"What possible trouble can there be?" M. Perissard protested.

"Well, you know, even a lamb will bleat if you handle him roughly."

"Our little lambkins don't!" the older man as? sured him with an oily, paternal smile in which his confrère nobly seconded him. "They have a horror of all kinds of fuss and do net draw attentions to themselves if they can help it."

"The fear of a fuss is the beginning of wisdom!" rose from M. Merivel's diaphragm in oracular thunder.

"So there is nothing to be afraid of! Our head office is in Paris," resumed M. Perissard, "But I have come to Bordeaux to open a branch office of which M. Merivel will be temporary manager. In a little while, when you understand our methods thoroughly, he will go to Marseilles and leave you in charge. Then we will double your salary and increase your share of the profits to fifteen per cent!"

Laroque wavered a moment, then suddenly straightened up to his feet and held out his hand.

"It's a bargain!" he said.

[CHAPTER XI]

CONCERNING DOWER CLAIMS

When the partners had pawed over and patted their new employer like a couple of affectionate behemoths welcoming back their lost offspring, the elder suggested that they must now come to the business details of the first mission which was to be entrusted to him. Laroque resumed his seat and prepared to listen but they smiled at him in paternal reproof.

"Not here, my indiscreet friend!"

"Most certainly not!"

The young man gazed at them astonished.

"Why, what's the matter with this place?" he demanded.

"Never discuss an important matter in detail within ear-shot of any wall, my dear young man!"! smiled M. Perissard, shaking his head.

"Most certainly not!" affirmed his confrère, decidedly, "Muribus aures—ahem!—The Latin has it!"

Laroque rose and reached for his hat and coat with a smile of amusement.

"Well, where do you want to go?"

"We will seek a—ah—safe spot in the vicinity!" replied the senior partner. Laroque put his head in the dressing room and remarked chat he was going out for a little while and the three allies departed.

M. Perissard led the way to a large café and selected a table in a not too prominent location but still where there was no chance of being overheard.

He ordered a bottle of Chateau Lafitte and expensive cigars, gave the waiter more than suitable pourboire and told him they would require nothing more. They were as much alone as they would have been on a South Sea atoll.

Three glasses were raised together and a little later three clouds of smoke arose from the table. M. Perissard gazed into his glass reflectively for a moment.

"You must understand, my dear Laroque," he began, "that our business is largely with those men who, in public or private life, are a menace to the well-being of society."

The adventurer nodded with a little smile of weary cynicism. M. Merivel said something about "latrones in officio."

"Imagine the shock, the grief to my colleague and myself," continued M. Perissard, "when we learned that a very high official of this fair city of France had falsified his accounts to the extent of one million francs, at least!"

If he expected to rouse his new employé to eager enthusiasm he was not disappointed. Laroque's face expressed it.

"His name I will disclose to you in due time," said M. Perissard, in reply to an unspoken question. "You are wondering how so a large a peculation can possibly be concealed and therefore be of any value to us.

"I will not conceal from you that the man is a power in this part of the country and has many rich and influential friends. He recently threw himself on the mercy of these and appealed to them for help. As they were under obligations of more or less doubtful character they could not fail to respond.

"They have now made up more than eight hundred thousand francs, I have reason to believe, and will have no difficulty in raising the balance. But there is no occasion for haste and he is all the more useful to them while they still have this hold over him.

"Fortunately for the cause of civic and national purity—so dear to the heart of every true citizen of the Republic!—some of them were so indiscreet as to put part of the negotiations into the form of correspondence. A letter or two, quite providentially—"

"Most providentially!" interjected M. Merivel.

"—Fell into our hands. We made investigations in a quiet way, as was our duty, and have secured What is almost legal proof of this astounding corruption!"

Laroque, stretched back in his chair, with his gleaming eyes half-veiled by the drooping lids nodded almost imperceptibly as M. Perissard paused. M. Merivel shook his head in heavy sadness over the fresh proof of the wickedness of man and sipped his wine.

"Now, then," resumed M. Perissard. "Since they are so willing to come forward with the full amount of his shortage they will undoubtedly be only too glad to add fifty or seventy-five thousand francs to the amount to insure the utmost secrecy. Ah—you understand, now?"

Laroque slowly heaved himself upright in his chair and rubbed his chin for a moment before replying.

"I understand, all right," he said doubtfully, "but if these friends of his can save him any time they choose, what is to prevent them from coming up with the money the moment we approach him?"

M. Perissard indulged him with another fatherly smile.

"Ah, my dear young sir, you don't quite understand as yet! If we go to the Public Prosecutor and lay our information in his hands he will have no way of knowing whether the money has been refunded without an official investigation, which will certainly ruin the gentlemen. For even if he escapes prison the fact that he is guilty of misconduct in office must be brought to light."

Laroque's face brightened.

"Ah, ha! I see!" he exclaimed, "It certainly begins to look promising!"

"Most promising!" rumbled M. Merivel.

Then they began to outline the details of the campaign, and it was late in the afternoon when M. Perissard suggested that there was nothing more to do.

"I need not impress upon you the necessity for the utmost tact and caution in dealing with this gentleman," he said in conclusion. "You can see that in his position he has powerful official influence and we must be careful that he does not trip us. He is shrewd, bold and unscrupulous."

"Most unscrupulous!" affirmed M. Merivel.

"By the way," said his colleague, suddenly, "you aren't married, are you?"

"Lord! No!" laughed Laroque.

"That's all right!" said M. Perissard, approvingly.

"Women are charming creatures, but in business-s-s!" M. Merivel's hands, shoulders and eye-brows went up.

"I was afraid when I saw the lady and I meant to mention it sooner!"

"Most charming woman!" declared M. Merivel, unctuously, "Artistic! Good-looking!"

"I met her at Buenos Ayres," explained Laroque, "She hadn't a son to bless herself with and was picking up a living around a café. There's no harm in her but she's taking a lot of trash—morphine, ether, opium and that sort of stuff—to help her forget, she says. She's a married woman, you know. Wife of a man in a good position and quite a shining light at the bar, she says."

"Really!" exclaimed M. Perissard, with interest, and he exchanged a glance with his colleague.

"Yes," went on Laroque carelessly, "Deputy Attorney in Paris, I believe. She was false to him and he turned her out."

M. Merivel's upraised hands indicated that he was shocked.

"Oh dear! Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" he groaned with a sigh like the roar of a tornado, "Even the morals of our magistrates and leading lawyers are not above suspicion these degenerate days!"

"Have some more wine!" laughed Laroque, filling his glass. But M. Perissard hardly heard either of them.

"Was this long ago?" he demanded eagerly.

"Twenty years ago," replied the young man, settling back in his chair. "She says she went to England shortly after he turned her out. Since then she has been to America, Colombia, Brazil, all over the place—sometimes rich and sometimes poor. When I met her she was dying to get back to France and didn't have a centime, so I brought her with me. Never liked to travel alone," he added with a grin.

But the master of "confidential missions" did not smile.

"Did she tell you the story herself?" he persisted.

"Yes," nodded Laroque, "one day when she'd had a little more ether than usual. It's funny sort of stuff—that! She's a silent sort of woman as a rule, but when she's been drinking ether she gets talkative, and if she doesn't become maudlin over her past, she breaks out with a hellish temper and says anything. She won't live long. About worn out—poor tramp!"

M. Perissard listened attentively.

"I have been thinking," he said slowly, when Laroque had finished, "that if her husband was a Deputy Attorney in Paris twenty years ago, he may be Attorney General now."

"Indeed, yes!" his partner nodded emphatically.

"This might lead to business," pursued the other in the same thoughtful tone.

Laroque's face betrayed that he, too, had grown suddenly keenly interested.

"How?" he demanded.

"Supposing the husband is now occupying a position worth having," suggested the older man, "He would be likely to make a sacrifice to prevent scandal about his wife from becoming public property."

M. Merivel's fat countenance expressed the most exalted admiration.

"Isn't he a wonderful man?" he breathed ecstatically. "Always getting ideas like that! A benefactor of humanity! Most certainly a benefactor!"

But his partner and Laroque did not heed.

"Do you know her husband's name?" asked the former.

"No, she never told me that."

"How old would you take her to be?"

"Past forty."

"H'm! He must have been rather young for the position if he was near her age. You are sure she never mentioned his name?"

"I would have remembered it if she had," replied Laroque.

"H'm! Well, I don't know that it matters. A Deputy Attorney in Paris whose wife left him twenty years ago ought not be difficult to find."

"Do you think so?"

"Mere child's play, my dear boy! And I think," he added, thoughtfully, "I think that, on the whole, this had better be your first piece of business. Ah! Wait!" he exclaimed with a sudden thought, "Did she ever mention that her own people were wealthy at the time of her marriage?"

Laroque scratched his head in an effort to remember.

"No, I don't think she ever did," he said at last "Why? It's the husband we'll have to see anyway? What have her people to do with it?"

"Why, don't you see," cried M. Perissard almost pityingly, "That if she is only a little past forty she must have married young and left her husband shortly afterward. The inference is that he was probably a young lawyer and without a great deal of money. He could not have married her unless she brought a dot."

"Well?" demanded Laroque, not catching the ether drift.

"Well, then! If he drove her out of the house she has a good claim to that money—unless he gave it to her then or later," he added anxiously. "Do you know?"

"I don't know whether she ever had a dot," replied Laroque, as the scheme dawned on him, "but if she did I'm certain that she didn't take it away with her."

"Excellent! Excellent!" exclaimed M. Perissard, pressing the palms of his hands together.

"Most excellent! Wonderful man!" breathed M. Merivel, with an upward glance of thanksgiving.

"Now, then," continued the former briskly, "we will stay the hand of punishment temporarily in the matter of this official scoundrel and teach this magistrate or attorney-general, or whatever he is, that he cannot turn his wife out of his house and keep her money!"

"But," objected Laroque. "I think there is a child, though I'm not certain."

"Makes no difference whatsoever!" declared M. Perissard. "The money goes to the child upon the death of its mother—not before!" He glanced at his watch. "You go back and find out all that you can from the lady and we will wait for you here. You should be able to pump her thoroughly in an hour. That will give you plenty of time to catch the six-thirty train for Paris. You might as well begin on the work right away."

"Most certainly!" agreed M. Merivel, with a heavy nod. "Nulla dies sine—H'm!—the Latin, of course!"

"We will wait for you here and give you your final instructions," added M. Perissard, as Laroque rose. "Oh, and try to get a power of attorney from her!" The latter nodded.

"I'll be back in an hour!" he promised, and with a wave of the hand he hurried out.

[CHAPTER XII]

"WHO SAVES ANOTHER——"

When the footsteps of the three protectors of society died away down the stairway of the Three Crowns, the woman opened the door of the dressing room and crept out.

"Thank God, they've gone!" she muttered, wearily, "I'd like to be alone always. People bore me to death. What a life! What a life!"

She walked across the room a trifle unsteadily and deposited her empty glass on the little table with the absinthe and sat down at the other one with her face to the door. She fumbled in a dingy hand-bag, slung to her left wrist, and presently produced a small vial, followed by a greasy pack of cheap cards.

None but the eyes of abiding love or undying hate would have seen in the pitiful, drug-ridden, half drunken, fast-sinking wreck any trace of the bewitching, laughing bride of twenty-odd years before. The austere ancient, who virtuously wrote "the descent into hell is easy," might have read in her face a different story of that dark pathway.

She took a swallow of the fluid in the bottle and coughed sharply as she recorked it. The peculiar odor of ether spread through the room. Then she began shuffling the cards as if about to play solitaire. Suddenly she stopped, threw herself across the table, buried her face in her arms and burst into tears....

Our life is like some vast lake that is slowly filling with the stream of our years. As the waters creep surely upward the landmarks of the past are one by one submerged. But there shall always be one memory to lift its head above the tide until the lake is full to overflowing. In the calmness of our days it is little noted, but the tempest-lashed waters are swept upon it again and again. It may be but the memory of a moment when a woman looked into our eyes with trust, or it maybe that that trust Was betrayed. But sweet or bitter, its ghost shall come in the hour of woe to whisper hope and solace, or to press more deeply the thorns into the anguished brow and add its weight to the burden of the cross....

Far back over the path of those twenty years Jacqueline had learned to hate her husband, but the memory and love of her boy grew stronger. She had sunk from indifference to degradation and from degradation to despair. She had been a man's joy of a year, his pleasure of a month and his plaything of an hour. But through it all the mother love had lived in the blackened soul and the mother heart—scarred and calloused as it was—yet yearned for her boy. But for this, the years of loathsome vice, of drink and drugs, would have brought at last the numbness of oblivion. She had sought it in vain. She had steeped herself in vice until at times the life within flickered dangerously. But it brought never a moment of forgetfulness. When she was sober, or not under the influence of drugs, she lived in the darkness of black despair. And when she turned to these "to help her forget," she did not know that that was not the reason. They revived and quickened the slowly numbing brain until she could feel again the wild anguish of hopeless loss; and as she sobbed out her agony she vaguely felt that she was again more nearly worthy to press her child to her breast.

In the past few months her enfeebled mind had gloated miserably over one dismal ray of hope—the hope of one moment of joy before she died. She had learned from a half-breed woman in Caracas the art of telling fortunes with cards, and hour after hour she retold her future with the soiled pack that she always carried. They told her that the fleeting second of happiness would be bought at the price of one life, to be followed by the end of her own. To that promise she clung....

The storm of weeping, as is the case with sobs that are due wholly or in part to drunkenness, ended as abruptly as it had begun. She took another swallow of the ether and began laying out the cards in the same weary seven rows. She looked over them quickly and wept again. Always the two deaths!

"Now, then," she straightened up with a snuffle, "I'll try again."

She was spreading them out once more when there came a knock at the door.

"Come in!" she called, without looking up. The maid, Marie, entered with pen and ink and a form that the police require the hotel-keepers to have filled out and filed by every guest.

She advanced, a little timidly, to the table and said.

"I hope I'm not disturbing you, madame, but the police make us go through this business." She held up the blank form.

The woman looked up, puzzled for a moment, and then nodded.

"Oh, yes, well then——Oh, write it yourself!" she snapped irritably, turning again to the cards. She took another drink of ether and looked up at the maid, as if she did not exactly remember the purpose of her visit.

"Monsieur and Madame Laroque," she said at last, listlessly, her eyes on the table. "From Buenos Ayres, on their way to Paris."

Marie filled in the blank.

"To Paris. Thank you, madame," she said. Then she stood looking curiously at the cards.

The woman raised her head.

"Is that all?"

"Yes, thank you. Are you telling fortunes with the cards?" Marie asked, timidly as the woman began studying the table once more.

"Yes."

"Then you really believe in them?"

"They're the only thing I do believe in," was the weary response.

"That's funny!" exclaimed the maid, with a nervous little smile. "I don't believe in them at all!"

"You will!" was the grim comment.

"Oh, it's like palmistry and all that sort of thing. It's all nonsense."

Jacqueline looked up at her pityingly.

"You don't know what you're talking about!" she declared, a little thickly. The ether and absinthe were beginning to work more powerfully.

"What do the cards tell you?" asked Marie, growing interested. Jacqueline gazed over the table again.

"Always the same thing, always the same thing!" she said, with a glassy stare, meant to be impressive. "Death! My own death! And it's coming very soon. That's what the cards tell me!"

The maid's eyes opened wide.

"Really!" she exclaimed breathlessly.

"They never change!" the woman went on in a dull monotone. Dissipation had left little of expression and given much of harshness to her voice. "I can see blood—a great deal of blood! But before I die I shall see the two people that I always see in my dreams, waking or sleeping—the man I love more than anything else in the world and the man I hate more than anything else in the world! The cards have been promising me for the last three months that I shall see them soon and that—I'll die! The cards have never been wrong, and that's why I wanted to get back to France."

"You believe in them as much as that?" asked the maid, wonderingly.

"Yes!"

She watched her rearranging the cards for some moments in silence.

"Won't you tell my fortune?" she asked at last with a little hesitation.

"What's the good if you don't believe?" retorted the woman, without looking up.

"Oh, I don't be—I don't believe in it," she stammered with a slight blush, "but I—I—do believe in it!"

Jacqueline glanced at her with the dispassionate, rolling gaze of a drunkard.

"Sit down!" she commanded. While Marie was settling herself on the edge of the bed she took another drink of the ether.

"Is that ether you're drinking?" asked the girl.

"Ye—yes!" coughed the woman, slipping in the cork.

"It smells horribly strong! What does it do to you?" she inquired, with shuddering curiosity.

"It changes my ideas and that's a good deal," was the grim reply. "But it gets on my nerves sometimes and then I cry or smash the furniture." Marie started.

"But that doesn't matter! What do you want to know?"

"Oh, but if I tell you that," smiled the maid, cunningly, "there'll be nothing in your telling my fortune, will there?"

"Don't tell me anything!" mumbled Jacqueline, shuffling the cards and spreading them out once more. She studied them in dead silence for a minute or more. Then:

"You're married!" she announced.

"Oh, there's nothing in that!" sniffed Marie; "You saw my ring."

"You have a child."

"Yes, the darling! Seven months old."

"You're in love."

The maids cheeks flushed with excitement.

"Yes! Yes!" she exclaimed.

"But not with your husband."

She straightened up.

'Death! My own death! That's what the cards tell me ...

"No, I should think not!" she exclaimed, almost indignantly.

"You are going to leave your husband!" went on the dull, even voice. Marie's cheeks paled and she gasped but did not reply. Jacqueline looked up slowly.

"Is it true?"

"Yes! it's quite true!" was the low reply in an awed tone. Then she added by way of justification: "My husband is Victor, the boots, who brought up your luggage."

"He seems to be a good fellow," remarked the woman, indifferently.

"Yes," the girl sniffed contemptuously, "but he's such a common sort of man!"

"And the other?" There was awakening interest in the stupid eyes and dull voice.

"Oh, the other is a gentleman! A real gentleman!" cried Marie, clasping her hands joyously. "He's a commercial traveler—in soap! He dresses beautifully and he smells—ah—m-m! I am to meet him to-night at the Grand Café, opposite the theater, and to-morrow we shall be fa-a-r-away!"

"And your baby?"

The girl shrugged her shoulders indifferently.

"He's out to nurse," she replied, "and I know his father will not let him want for anything!"

Jacqueline consulted the bottle again.

"Look here, my girl! You're going to make a fool of yourself!" she declared with drunken bluntness. "Take my tip and stay with your husband! Be false to him if you must, but stay with him!"

"No, no! I love no one in the world but Anatole!" cried the girl, melodramatically. "And I'm going away with him to-night!"

"Well, you'll suffer in the long run!" was the other's grim assurance, with something of a return of her usual indifference.

"No, I shan't! Anatole loves the very ground I walk on!" declared Marie, proudly.

"H'mph! He may now, but it won't last," retorted the woman. "Your lover will leave and you'll take another—and then a third and fourth, and you'll see what sort of a life that means. I know!"

The girl opened her pretty eyes wide.

"Do you?" she asked, with a little shiver of awe.

"Yes! I was about your age when I left my husband and my child. I hate my husband God! How I hate him!" she burst out, her eyes blazing with insane fury, he clenched fists above her head. Marie half started toward the door, fearing that one of the furniture-breaking moods was coming on. But as suddenly the voice dropped back to its toneless level and the eyes dulled. "But I'm dying because my child is not with me. Child! Why, he must be a man of twenty-four now, and I'm sure he's a tall, handsome fellow that everybody loves and admires. Just think of it! I might be walking down the street—now—on his arm! Wouldn't I be proud! And I don't even know him. I think of him night and day—all the time I think of him. And if he came into this room now I wouldn't know him. But I shall see him again!" she cried, excitedly, clutching the cards. "I'm sure of that! I know it! But—but I shall not—be able to—kiss him—and press him to my heart. He'll never know who I am!"

Jacqueline shook her head with a solemnity born of the stimulants, and went on thickly:

"I'd be ashamed! He might despise me or reproach me, and I couldn't stand that. He—he—thinks I died years ago and—and I'm glad of it Oh, Raymond! My boy, my laddie!" And again there was a quick burst of tears.

Marie sprang up hastily and hurried over to the table, touching the sobbing woman gently on the arm.

"Oh, madame! Don't cry, don't cry!" she pleaded, with clumsy sympathy.

"Better be warned by my case!" wept the woman, in a high, queer voice. "You're a pretty girl—now—but you—won't be long! Your lover'll leave you as mine left me! Men—soon get tired. I used to be pretty, too!"

The girl began to cry at the sight of the other's distress.

"I'm sure Anatole will never leave me!" she whimpered.

Jacqueline's tears stopped as suddenly as if they had been turned off at a spigot and she sat up, rigid.

"Then you're a d——d fool!" she snapped

Marie wept more bitterly.

And then—God knows how!—as she stared at the sobbing girl, somewhere in her warped! soul the ether found a spark of womanly pity and fanned it to a little flame of weak resolve. ... "He saved others. Himself he could not save.

"Sit down!" she commanded, harshly. "And let me tell you a story, and maybe it will save you some of the suffering that I went through."

[CHAPTER XIII]

FROM OUT THE SHADOW

Jacqueline brushed the cards to one side, coughed over the ether bottle again and lit another cigarette. The girl settled herself, snuffling on the edge of the bed and wiped her eyes. When she looked up the woman was leering at her contemptuously.

"S'pose you think you're beautiful, don't you?" she demanded scornfully, slurring huskily over the words. "S'pose you think you see why anybody'd grow tired of me, but you're different, eh? Let me tell you, m'girl, when I was your age, if anybody'd put us side by side, there's no man in the world would ha' looked at you twice!"

And she glared at her as if daring her to deny it.

"Not a man in the world!" she repeated, proudly, fixing her bleared eyes on the girl's fresh, young face. "Why, my lovers used to tell that——But that's not what I wanted to tell you! Let me see! What was it?" her eyes wandered and she frowned. The ether was sweeping over her in waves. "Oh, yes! I wanted to tell you that's it's all right 'bout your husband. Don't pay any attention to this rot about being true to him. Nobody cares anything 'bout husbands! Husbands are no good! No good! I could have a dozen husbands!" Her head sank and she waved her hand feebly as if dismissing the whole tribe of married men. The mumbled words died away in incoherencies.

The girl watched her a little frightened.

"You were going to tell me a story," she reminded her timidly.

Jacqueline sat bolt upright, her eyes blazing with senseless anger.

"Of course, I am!" she snapped. "You shut up and le' me tell it my own way an' maybe it'll do you some good!" Marie shrank back and glanced nervously at the door.

"But that's all light!" the woman assured her generously. "You didn't mean anything wrong. I'm going t' tell you why you better not go'way and leave your boy like I did...."

She bowed her head again for a moment and, spurred by the drug, her memory slowly unfolded the panorama of her past. All its happiness, all its sorrow, misery and despair came back to her. As she told the tale her voice was sometimes harsh and indifferent and sometimes only a drunken mumble. Again it was faintly vibrant with the ghost of a lost emotion, or the knife-thrust of reawakened grief cut off the words in her throat. And the simple girl on the bed leaned forward and listened with glistening eyes and hectic cheeks....

"Twenty-five—twenty-six—I don't know how many years ago—I lived in a big house not many miles from this place," she began, slowly. "I was the only child and I don't remember much about my father and mother. They died young. It was a small place and I didn't know much about life—but I learned plenty afterwards.

"You're a peasant," she went on with harsh contempt. "You don't know anything about how girls like I was, are brought up. When I was sixteen I knew only two young men more than to bow to when I met them. One was named Noel—I'd known him all my life—and the other's name was—Louis!" The liquid word came gratingly off her tongue.

"He was older than Noel and he was one of these grave, dignified young men, all wrapped up in his work. He was a lawyer and I guess he was a pretty good one. Everybody seemed to think so. Well, anyway, we fell in love with each other, and I married him before I was nineteen. Maybe the other one loved me, too," she added, carelessly "He tried to kill himself a little while after I married his friend.

"After our honeymoon we took a house in Paris, where his work was. He was ambitious and wanted to be a Deputy Attorney. I didn't see much of him after we settled down, because he was giving so much time to his work, but I didn't care much—then. I loved him so and—I had something else to think about. And when he came I was the happiest girl in Paris. He was the prettiest, little, dark-eyed——" The sentence ended in a choke and she put out her hand for the ether bottle....

"For a while the baby was everything to me, but he couldn't be always. I wanted my husband. I liked fun and a gay time, but he was always too busy—too busy!—until I grew angry at him. He thought that the baby and the little that I saw of him in the evening occasionally were all that I needed.

"Sometimes when he was working in his study I used to go in and try to talk to him and get him to tell me what he was doing. I wanted to be more in his life. He always laughed and said that I wouldn't understand and—then he'd turn me out.

"I begged him to take me to the theater, to the carnival, to the country—anywhere for life and amusement—but he never had time. I used to cry myself to sleep at night.

"One evening he brought home a young man to dinner with him. They were very happy. My husband had saved the young man in some case or other—he never took the trouble to tell me, or I forget what it was. He was a witty, handsome fellow, and that was the merriest dinner I ever had.

"The young man—his name was Albert—seemed to have a pretty good time himself, for he came often after that. I suppose my fool of a husband," she grated the word viciously, "thought that he was coming all the time to show his gratitude! One afternoon while he was there, I wanted to go driving and he asked Albert to take me—so he could go on with his d——d work!

"That's the way he discovered how to keep me amused and without interfering with his own plans. Albert was always my escort after that, and the more my husband neglected me the angrier I grew. He didn't have brains enough to know that no man devotes his time to a married woman out of gratitude to her husband.

"Albert was always respectful—oh, yes, always respectful! But he could tell a lot with his eyes, and the more enraged I was with my husband the more I listened to what his eyes were saying. Once, in a carriage, he picked up my gloves and kissed them again and again. But he never spoke a word of love or put a disrespectful finger on me. Oh, he knew women, he did! He knew women!" she chuckled, tipsily.

"I had one of the first editions of every new book. There were flowers every day. He had me in a box at the opening of every new play. Once I mentioned that I would like to have some real white heather to make birthday favors. I didn't see him for four days and then he came out to the house with a trunk-load, nearly. He had gone to Scotland for it. D'you ever have a lover'd do that for you?" she demanded, with a fierce frown.

"You bet you didn't!" she went on proudly, while Marie was trying to imagine Anatole en route for Scotland. "That's the kind of lovers I had!

"Well, one Sunday I wanted my husband to go to Fontainebleau with me and he wouldn't do it. That was the finish! Albert saw something—for he began to make love to me. When I felt his first kiss on my hand, I started! I was about to jerk it away, when I remembered how my husband had treated me and I let him go on. Ah! he knew how to make love!" she declared, with the admiration of a savant.

"When I returned to my husband that night, I was frightened! I knew that I cared for Albert more than I should and I wanted him to protect me. When I tried to talk to him he told me to run along and play with Albert! And I did! I went! I went! I went! I——" The voice trailed off into a sob. She buried her face in her arms for a few moments and the table shook. The girl on the bed was in a semi-hypnotic trance and did not stir. When Jacqueline raised her head her face was set in its usual stony mask.

"When I came back that night," her voice was hard and high, "I was no longer a pure woman. I crept into bed and wept, afraid that my husband would question me when he came to say good-night. He didn't come. He was thinking about one of his problems and forgot it. All my remorse was gone in a moment. I didn't think of him or my boy. I was mad—crazy! I gave myself up to Albert without a thought of the future!

"But it didn't last long!" she wagged her head solemnly. "My husband came home too early one night and found us in my room. Never should ha' been there! Never! Never, never! But I thought I hated him so much that I wanted to be untrue to him in his own house. Well, when he opened the door he just stood there and looked at us for a minute and didn't say a word. Then he went off down the hall toward his study. We ran down-stairs and out of the house and——" She stopped, her eyes wavering and her face wrinkling, as the absinthe or the ether apparently sketched a humorous picture on her mind.

"Hee! Hee!" she cackled hysterically. "I'll bet he was surprised when he came back! Hee, hee, hee! I never thought of that! Hee, hee, hee! Ha, ha, ha! I never—ha, ha, ha!" And she rocked back and forth in uncanny mirth until the laughter changed to sobs. Then she stiffened suddenly and tried to glare at Marie with watery eyes.

"What you laughing at? S'there anything funny?" she demanded, belligerently. The frightened girl, who had not made a sound, began a stammering protest. She was too much fascinated by the evil story and its creepy narrator to think of rushing out of the room.

"'S all right! All right! But don't do it again," Jacqueline warned her. "Now, le' me see! Oh, yes! Well, Albert and I went down South and bought a little place in the country and lived there for a long time. Happy? No, I wasn't happy! I wanted my boy. My boy! My boy!" And again she burst into tears.

"I hadn't been there but a little more than a year," she went on, snuffling and wiping her eyes, "when I told him I couldn't live without my baby and I was going to ask my husband to forgive me. He begged me not to do it, and for months I was afraid to try. At last, he took pneumonia and died.

"I wrote three letters to my husband, asking Aim to see me, and he never answered. That made me all the more afraid to meet him, and I don't think I would ever have had the courage if I had not overheard a conversation between two men in a café one evening. They had just come from Paris. They were lawyers, and one of them was wondering at my husband's strength. He said that my boy had been dangerously ill, and that my husband was beside his bed all night, but in Court every day as usual.

"When I heard that my baby might be dying I nearly swooned; and, before I had recovered, the two men were gone. I called a cab and drove to the railway station as fast as I could, and within a few hours I was in Paris. Nearly all of my fear of my husband was gone in my grief about my baby and I hurried to the house where we had lived as fast as a horse could go. When I got there I found that he had moved to Passy shortly after I—I left him. It was late in the evening when I found the place."

Jacqueline paused and her head sank slowly on to the table. After a few moments she sat up and reached feverishly for the ether bottle.

"The—hugh!—maid knew—hugh! hugh—knew, me," she coughed, "but I begged her to tell my husband that a woman wanted to see him, without giving him my name. When he came in he tried to put me out of the house without listening to me. I groveled at his feet and begged him to let me see my boy! I told him how I had suffered and how bitterly I had repented the wrong I had done him, and for a time I thought he would yield and forgive me. But when I told him that my lover was dead he thought that was the only reason that I had returned to him and he went mad with rage. In spite of my tears and struggles he pushed me out of the house and—and—and—I had lost—my boy—forever!..."

"You remember that, d'you hear?" she demanded. "You can kill a man, and if you've any sort of reason everybody may forgive. But if you're untrue to your husband—it doesn't make any difference how much reason you have—every-body'll kick you...."

[CHAPTER XIV]

SIC ITUR AD AVERNO

Jacqueline fumbled in the box for another cigarette and held it, unlighted, in her hand as she went on.

"I don't remember much what happened for the next few hours after that. I must have found my way back to Paris somehow, because while it was still dark I was standing at the edge of an embankment looking into the Seine.

"It was raining and my clothes were wet through and through. I didn't know what I was doing or how I got there. A light on the other side threw a reflection across, almost to my feet; and, as I looked down, I saw my baby in the water!"

Her voice had dropped until it was barely audible across the room, and she leaned toward Marie, her eyes shining with an insane light.

"I s'pose you think I'm crazy, eh? Couldn't have seen? Well, you don't know all about babies, my girl!

"D'you ever see your baby in the river?" she demanded, with hoarse fierceness. The girl's only reply was a dry sob and a shudder.

"Well, you will if you run away with that d——d soap peddler of yours," she grumbled, settling back in her chair....

"I was just going to get into the river and take him in my arms when someone caught hold of my wrist and I heard a man's voice asking, 'Are you ill, madame?'

"I don't know what I said, but he put his arm through mine, led me into a little café where he made me drink some brandy before he would let me say a word. Then he called a cab and asked me where I lived.

"In the light of the café I had a chance to look at him when the brandy made me feel a little warmer. I knew by his accent that he was an Englishman. He had curly brown hair and a pink and white skin—altogether a nice-looking young man! He seemed to be less than thirty, and he talked and acted toward me as he would have if I had been his sister.

"When the cab came he wanted to take me home in it. I told him that I had no place to go and begged him to go away and leave me. He sat down again and I don't remember how much of my story I told him.

"He told me afterward that I fainted in the cab; but when I could understand things clearly once more, I was lying in a big soft bed in a beautifully furnished room. There were pictures and statues and heavy draperies everywhere. Foils and arms and books were scattered about. There was a little table covered with bottles beside my bed and a nurse sitting near by. When she saw that I was awake she told me that I was in the Englishman's apartment and that I had been delirious for three weeks.

"In a little while he came in and told me how he had brought me home and had sent for a doctor and nurse. The doctor said that I had narrowly escaped brain fever. I went to sleep again in a little while and did not wake until the next day. The nurse stayed less than a week after that and he came into my room and read and talked to me by the hour. He told me all about himself. He was the son of a wealthy English family and had developed a love for painting which he had ample money to cultivate.

"He was a bright, cheerful young fellow, and in his company and through his care I grew strong rapidly. He never asked me to tell him one word about my past or my plans for the future. When I was able to sit up comfortably in bed he brought his easel into the room and painted me. He was given honorable mention for it.

"All this time I was worrying about what I was to do when I grew strong enough to leave his rooms. I made up my mind that I would try to find work of some sort in the millinery shops. One day I mentioned to him that I would be leaving in a short time, and he looked very grave and asked me what I intended doing. I told him and he approved of the plan. In all this time he had not as much as given me a passionate glance.

"He insisted, when I was able to go out, that I should make my home there, until I was established in a place where I could make a living, and loaned me the money to get clothes that I needed. I did not love him, but I worshipped him for his goodness.

"It was disappointing work—trying to find employment, and I could not make enough to live on decently. I had never had to be very careful of money before, and I did not know how. He advised me, and helped me, cheered me all he could, and we ate supper together every night.

"I was making a few francs a week trimming hats, and when we began telling our experiences of the day those little suppers were almost merry. I was learning to hate my husband with a hate that will be with me till I die," and the glow of her dark eyes put the seal of truth on the words, "and when John—my Englishman—told his jokes and blunders, the pain of the longing for my boy did not hurt so much.

"Then I lost my miserable position, and it was days before I got another, although it was a better one when I did find it. During that time he was even more thoughtful and attentive and did not give me a chance to feel hopeless very long.

"The night, after I went to work again, we were sitting in the room where I had lain ill and he was telling me, with many laughs, about a picture that a fellow student was painting. As I watched his clean, handsome face and listened to his cheery talk I thought of all that he had done for me—that he had asked for nothing and received nothing but my empty words of gratitude—and my eyes filled with tears. The next moment I was kneeling before his chair, kissing his hands....

"His story stopped with a gasp, and I felt him tremble. Then he drew his hands away and raised me up to him and I kissed his lips and eyes and hair again and again. And ... that night ... I gave him ... all I had ... to give!...

"He never really loved me, but he was happy with me for a long time, and when he went back to England he took me with him. His home was only a few hours' ride from London, where he found apartments for me, and he was with me more than he was at home.

"Finally his visits were not so frequent and regular and they kept falling off, until once I did not see him for nearly three weeks. When he came he told me he had to tell me something that he was sure would hurt me, but he couldn't help it. He had fallen in love with an English girl, whom he had known all his life, and hoped to marry her; so he would have to break with me. He was always very liberal in money matters, and he wanted to keep on sending me the same allowance that he had given me when I settled in London. But I was too proud—then—to take it. I gathered together what money I had saved, packed my clothes and left that day.

"I took a cheap room and started out to find work again. I was given a place as clerk in a millinery store and by living as carefully as I could I did not have to draw often on my savings. But I had to draw on them a little and I was beginning to feel reckless, when an American theatrical man, who was spending part of the summer in England, came into the store one day o buy some ladies' gloves. I waited on him, and—well, in a few days I left my cheap room, and that fall I went back to New York with him.

"He wasn't as careful of my feelings as the Englishman was——You'll find that out, too, my girl," she broke off, with a grin of drunken cynicism. "After the first two or three, your lovers don't think much about your feelings. He left me destitute in less than a month after we got to New York!

"I tried to get work but I couldn't. The woman where I roomed took all of my clothes, except those had on, to pay for my room, and turned me out. I walked the streets all that night and the next day without anything to eat, and the next night stopped a well-dressed man and asked him if he could give me enough money to get some food. He walked on as if he had not heard me, and then next instant a man stepped out of a doorway and told me I was under arrest!

"He took me to a police station where I spent the rest of the night in cell, and the next morning I was taken to court. The detective who had arrested me told the judge that he had seen me speak to a strange man on the street, and the judge gave me my choice of paying a fine of twenty-five francs or going to prison for a month. I tried to explain that I had had nothing to eat for two days and that I had only asked the man for a little money, but they would not listen to me. Just as they were about to take me away to prison, as I had seen them take three or four other girls before me, a young man, very stylishly dressed, came forward and said that he would pay my fine. The clerk took his money and he led me out of the courtroom.

"When we were outside I tried to thank him, but I was so weak with hunger and weariness that I could hardly speak or stand. He took me to a little restaurant a few steps away and made me eat until I felt that I would never be hungry again. During breakfast he learned that I was alone, friendless and penniless, and he said he would help me. I went with him and he took me to his room where ... we stayed all day!

"That night he took me out, saying that he would get me a room of my own. We went to a nice-looking house not far from one of the main streets of the city where a pleasant woman met us at the door. He asked me to sit down while he explained about me to the woman and when she came in to show me to my room she was very kind. The next morning my clothes were gone from my room and there was nothing in their place but a low-cut wrapper that I couldn't wear on the street. I was a prisoner....

"I was in that house for more than a year and I made sometimes seventy-five—a hundred—a hundred and fifty francs in a day and a night, but I was never allowed to keep any of the money. The woman took part of it and the man who brought me there got the rest. I was on the point of trying to run away two or three times, but the girls in the house told me that I would be arrested and sent to prison and would have to come back to him in the end. Several of them had tried when they were first made slaves...."

The voice that had been dispassionate, almost impersonal through the latter part of the story, suddenly ceased. Jacqueline gulped at the ether bottle again and lit the cigarette she had been holding in her fingers. She was silent so long that Marie looked up at her, with something between a sob and a shudder.

"Is that all?" she half whispered.

The woman once more burst into a harsh, eerie laugh.

"All! All!" she repeated with drunken scorn. "Oh, hell! That's only the beginning! Where d'you s'pose I've been for the last fifteen years?—Well, I've been where you'll be if you run off with your soap peddler!" and she glared wickedly.

"I was sent all over the country," she went on, "always living the same life, and always with a different master. At last I got back to New York and had to go on the streets to make a living for myself and money for the man that owned me. One night, when my feet were wet with rain and I was cold all through, a girl showed me that an opium pill would make me feel better.

"After that I was never without some sort of drug, but I found out that ether is the best. Ether is the best!" And her eyes rested lovingly on the little bottle.

"I don't know how many years I was in the 'land of the free.' I'd have been about as well off there as anywhere else if it hadn't been for a lot of fool-women who were always trying to save me. There's a lot of women over there that have plenty of money and nothing to do, and instead of doing nothing they keep sticking their noses into other people's business. I'd like to choke some of 'em!" she blazed out viciously.

"Save me!" she sneered with her mirthless laugh. "They got hold of me once when I was arrested and gave me a place where I could make twenty-five or thirty francs a week if I worked hard. All the time they looked at me and acted as if I was some new sort of a wild beast. When they put me in that work-shop they all called and said, 'Now, you're all right!'

"'All right!' I could hardly help laughing in their faces. They couldn't put my boy in my arms nor clean the stain from my body or drive the hell out of my soul, but they thought that twenty-five francs a week ought to be a good substitute for all three. It wouldn't much more than buy my food and whiskey and drugs. And because I left I was, 'incorrigible' and they sent me to prison——!

"When I was released the man that was collecting my money at that time told me that I wouldn't be of any more use to him in New York and he sold me to a man who was taking some women to South America. It isn't hard to get a lover in South America, and I had been there only a little while when I was free. Then I roamed around from one city to another, sometimes with one man, sometimes with another, until I met—this"—she nodded toward the door—"in Buenos Ayres. A woman in a dance-hall at Caracas taught me how to tell fortunes with cards, and when I learned that I had not long to live and would see my boy before I died I wanted to get back to France. He brought me."

There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of Marie's soft weeping. Jacqueline looked at her reflectively.

"Now, you're going to go the same way I did," she went on with a solemn air, born of the stimulants. "Remember what I tell you, m'girl. When you run away with that man you're through with being a decent, happy woman! I was an aristocratic prostitute once. You'll never be anything but a common one! Nobody'll try to stop you. Women'll be a sight harder on you than men. The men'll amuse themselves with you and push you a little farther down, but the women'll push you down and swear at you while they're doing it!—--Well?"

"I'm sure—Anatole—will never—leave me!" sobbed the girl. Jacqueline gazed at her as if trying to decide whether it were worth while to continue the argument. Then the ether moved her to impatient anger.

"All right, you d——d fool!" she snapped, "Get out of here!"

Marie rose, weeping more loudly and bitterly.

"Isn't there—something—I can do for you?"

"No! Get out!"

As the door closed behind the girl Jacqueline's head fell on the table with a long convulsive sob. She was silent for a long time and then, sitting up, she turned once more to the cards.

[CHAPTER XV]

THE SWELLING OF JORDAN

Laroque almost skipped with delight as he hurried back to the Three Crowns. The prospect of making plenty of money without working for it acted like champagne on his restless, reckless mind. Before he had walked a hundred steps he was building air-castles to be inhabited four or five years hence. He had no intention of remaining long as an employé of Messrs. Perissard and Merivel. The pay was good and the percentage of the two "missions" that had already been unfolded to him would be larger. He told himself that the first really big sum of money that he collected he would brazenly put in his pocket and whistle at the partners. Then he would buy out a small café somewhere in a paying neighborhood and settle down to a life of ease.

And if the woman at the hotel had really brought her husband a dower of considerable size, as Perissard's logic seemed to prove, here was the chance made right to his hand. He would get the money, abandon the woman, and the rest of his years would be a pathway of ease.

So he sprang up the stairs, three at a time and threw open the door of the room, singing a song of the dance-halls. Jacqueline glanced up as he came in and then went on with her reading of the future.

He tossed his hat on to the bed, kicked a chair up to the table and dropped into it with a cheery:

"Do you know, old girl, this man Perissard is a wonderful old chap?"

"Is he?" she asked, absent-mindedly, without raising her head.

"I should think he was!" was the enthusiastic response. "Brimful of ideas!"

"Has he got anything for you?"

"Rather! He's offered me a place in his office?"

"What does he do in his office?"

"Oh—business!"

At the evasive reply, Jacqueline raised her head curiously.

"What kind of business?" she asked, with a trace of interest in the thick voice.

"Oh, business of all kinds! He really is an extraordinary man! Do you know, the moment he set eyes on you he saw that you were a woman of good family?"

These were the first words that she seemed to hear clearly, and her face displayed a foolish smile of gratified vanity.

"Did he really?"

"Yes! 'There's blood in her,' he said," went on Laroque, impressively. "Those were the very words he used."

Jacqueline raised the ether bottle.

"Here's his health!" she cried, taking another drink.

"I told him he could go and bet on it!" continued Laroque.

"You—you didn't tell him—who I was!" exclaimed Jacqueline, a dawning fright in her bleared eyes. She had forgotten for the moment that Laroque did not really know.

"Not much!" was the emphatic reply. "No," he laughed. "I told him, after making him promise to keep it secret, that you were the daughter of a general—that your father and mother were very rich—that your husband was a marquis and you had brought him 300,000 francs on your marriage!"

Jacqueline's hysterical cackle was added to his laugh.

"That's good! Veree good!" she chuckled. "And he b'lieved it, did he?"

"Every word of it! What do you think of that? Three hundred thousand francs! Ha, ha! And I suppose you didn't bring him a son, did you?"