JASON

From Ste. Marie's little flat, which overlooked the gardens, they drove down the quiet rue du Luxembourg, and at the Place St. Sulpice turned to the left. They crossed the Place St. Germain des Prés, where lines of home-bound working-people stood waiting for places in the electric trams, and groups of students from the Beaux Arts or from Julien's sat under the awnings of the Deux Magots, and so, beyond that busy square, they came into the long and peaceful stretch of the Boulevard St. Germain. The warm, sweet dusk gathered round them as they went, and the evening air was fresh and aromatic in their faces. There had been a little gentle shower in the late afternoon, and roadway and pavement were still damp with it. It had wet the new-grown leaves of the chestnuts and acacias that bordered the street. The scent of that living green blended with the scent of laid dust and the fragrance of the last late-clinging chestnut blossoms; it caught up a fuller, richer burden from the overflowing front of a florist's shop; it stole from open windows a savory whiff of cooking, a salt tang of wood smoke; and the soft little breeze--the breeze of coming summer--mixed all together and tossed them and bore them down the long, quiet street; and it was the breath of Paris, and it shall be in your nostrils and mine, a keen agony of sweetness, so long as we may live and so wide as we may wander--because we have known it and loved it--and in the end we shall go back to breathe it when we die.

The strong white horse jogged evenly along over the wooden pavement, its head down, the little bell at its neck jingling pleasantly as it went. The cocher, a torpid, purplish lump of gross flesh, pyramidal, pearlike, sat immobile in his place. The protuberant back gave him an extraordinary effect of being buttoned into his fawn-colored coat wrong side before. At intervals he jerked the reins like a large strange toy, and his strident voice said:

"Hé!" to the stout white horse, which paid no attention whatever. Once the beast stumbled and the pearlike lump of flesh insulted it, saying:

"Hé! veux tu, cochon!"

Before the War Office a little black slip of a milliner's girl dodged under the horse's head, saving herself and the huge box slung to her arm by a miracle of agility, and the cocher called her the most frightful names, without turning his head and in a perfunctory tone quite free from passion.

Young Hartley laughed and turned to look at his companion, but Ste. Marie sat still in his place, his hat pulled a little down over his brows and his handsome chin buried in the folds of the white silk muffler with which for some obscure reason he had swathed his neck.

"This is the first time in many years," said the Englishman, "that I have known you to be silent for ten whole minutes. Are you ill, or are you making up little epigrams to say at the dinner-party?"

Ste. Marie waved a despondent glove.

"I 'ave," said he, "w'at you call ze blue. Papillons noirs--clouds in my soul." It was a species of jest with Ste. Marie--and he seemed never to tire of it--to pretend that he spoke English very brokenly. As a matter of fact, he spoke it quite as well as any Englishman and without the slightest trace of accent. He had discovered a long time before this--it may have been while the two were at Eton together--that it annoyed Hartley very much, particularly when it was done in company and before strangers. In consequence he became on such occasions a sort of comic-paper caricature of his race, and by dint of much practice, added to a naturally alert mind, he became astonishingly ingenious in the torture of that honest but unimaginative gentleman whom he considered his best friend. He achieved the most surprising expressions by the mere literal translation of French idiom, and he could at any time bring Hartley to a crimson agony by calling him "my dear "'before other men, whereas at the equivalent "mon cher" the Englishman would doubtless never, as the phrase goes, have batted an eye.

"Ye-es," he continued, sadly, "I 'ave ze blue. I weep. Weez ze tears full ze eyes. Yes." He descended into English. "I think something's going to happen to me. There's calamity, or something, in the air. Perhaps I'm going to die."

"Oh, I know what you are going to do, right enough," said the other man. "You're going to meet the most beautiful woman--girl--in the world at dinner, and of course you are going to fall in love with her."

"Ah, the Miss Benham!" said Ste. Marie, with a faint show of interest. "I remember now, you said that she was to be there. I had forgotten. Yes, I shall be glad to meet her. One hears so much. But why am I of course going to fall in love with her?"

"Well, in the first place," said Hartley, "you always fall in love with all pretty women as a matter of habit, and, in the second place, everybody--well, I suppose you--no one could help falling in love with her, I should think."

"That's high praise to come from you," said the other. And Hartley said, with a short, not very mirthful laugh:

"Oh, I don't pretend to be immune. We all--everybody who knows her. You'll understand presently."

Ste. Marie turned his head a little and looked curiously at his friend, for he considered that he knew the not very expressive intonations of that young gentleman's voice rather well, and this was something unusual. He wondered what had been happening during his six months' absence from Paris.

"I dare say that's what I feel in the air, then," he said, after a little pause. "It's not calamity; it's love.

"Or maybe," he said, quaintly, "it's both. L'un n'empêche pas I'autre." And he gave an odd little shiver, as if that something in the air had suddenly blown chill upon him.

They were passing the corner of the Chamber of Deputies, which faces the Pont de la Concorde. Ste. Marie pulled out his watch and looked at it.

"Eight-fifteen," said he. "What time are we asked for--eight-thirty? That means nine: It's an English house, and nobody will be on time. It's out of fashion to be prompt nowadays."

"I should hardly call the Marquis de Saulnes English, you know," objected Hartley.

"Well, his wife is," said the other, "and they're altogether English in manner. Dinner won't be before nine. Shall we get out, and walk across the bridge and up the Champs-Elysées? I should like to, I think. I like to walk at this time of the evening--between the daylight and the dark." Hartley nodded a rather reluctant assent, and Ste. Marie prodded the pear-shaped cocher in the back with his stick. So they got down at the approach to the bridge, Ste. Marie gave the cocher a piece of two francs, and they turned away on foot. The pear-shaped one looked at the coin in his fat hand as if it were something unclean and contemptible--something to be despised. He glanced at the dial of his taximeter, which had registered one franc twenty-five, and pulled the flag up. He spat gloomily out into the street, and his purple lips moved in words. He seemed to say something like "Sale diable de métier!" which, considering the fact that he had just been overpaid, appears unwarrantably pessimistic in tone. Thereafter he spat again, picked up his reins and jerked them, saying:

"Hè, Jean Baptiste! Uip, uip!" The unemotional white horse turned up the boulevard, trotting evenly at its steady pace, head down, the little bell at its neck jingling pleasantly as it went. It occurs to me that the white horse was probably unique. I doubt that there was another horse in Paris rejoicing in that extraordinary name.

But the two young men walked slowly on across the Pont de la Concorde. They went in silence, for Hartley was thinking still of Miss Helen Benham, and Ste. Marie was thinking of Heaven knows what. His gloom was unaccountable unless he had really meant what he said about feeling calamity in the air. It was very unlike him to have nothing to say. Midway of the bridge he stopped and turned to look out over the river, and the other man halted beside him. The dusk was thickening almost perceptibly, but it was yet far from dark. The swift river ran leaden beneath them, and the river boats, mouches and hirondelles, darted silently under the arches of the bridge, making their last trips for the day. Away to the west, where their faces were turned, the sky was still faintly washed with color, lemon and dusky orange and pale thin green. A single long strip of cirrus cloud was touched with pink, a lifeless old rose, such as is popular among decorators for the silk hangings of a woman's boudoir. And black against this pallid wash of colors the tour Eiffel stood high and slender and rather ghostly. By day it is an ugly thing, a preposterous iron finger upthrust by man's vanity against God's serene sky; but the haze of evening drapes it in a merciful semi-obscurity and it is beautiful.

Ste. Marie leaned upon the parapet of the bridge, arms folded before him and eyes afar. He began to sing, à demi-voix, a little phrase out of Louise--an invocation to Paris--and the Englishman stirred uneasily beside him. It seemed to Hartley that to stand on a bridge, in a top-hat and evening clothes, and sing operatic airs while people passed back and forth behind you, was one of the things that are not done. He tried to imagine himself singing in the middle of Westminster Bridge at half-past eight of an evening, and he felt quite hot all over at the thought. It was not done at all, he said to himself. He looked a little nervously at the people who were passing, and it seemed to him that they stared at him and at the unconscious Ste. Marie, though in truth they did nothing of the sort. He turned back and touched his friend on the arm, saying:

"I think we'd best be getting along, you know." But Ste. Marie was very far away, and did not hear. So then he fell to watching the man's dark and handsome face, and to thinking how little the years at Eton and the year or two at Oxford had set any real stamp upon him. He would never be anything but Latin, in spite of his Irish mother and his public school. Hartley thought what a pity that was. As Englishmen go, he was not illiberal, but, no more than he could have altered the color of his eyes, could he have believed that anything foreign would not be improved by becoming English. That was born in him, as it is born in most Englishmen, and it was a perfectly simple and honest belief. He felt a deeper affection for this handsome and volatile young man whom all women loved, and who bade fair to spend his life at their successive feet--for he certainly had never shown the slightest desire to take up any sterner employment--he felt a deeper affection for Ste. Marie than for any other man he knew, but he had always wished that Ste. Marie were an Englishman, and he had always felt a slight sense of shame over his friend's un-English ways.

After a moment he touched him again on the arm, saying:

"Come along! We shall be late, you know. You can finish your little concert another time."

"Eh!" cried Ste. Marie. "Quoi, donc?" He turned with a start.

"Oh yes!" said he. "Yes, come along! I was mooning. Allons! Allons, my old!" He took Hartley's arm and began to shove him along at a rapid walk. "I will moon no more," he said. "Instead, you shall tell me about the wonderful Miss Benham whom everybody is talking about. Isn't there something odd connected with the family? I vaguely recall something unusual--some mystery or misfortune or something. But first a moment! One small moment, my old. Regard me that!" They had come to the end of the bridge, and the great Place de la Concorde lay before them.

"In all the world," said Ste. Marie--and he spoke the truth--"there is not another such square. Regard it, mon brave! Bow yourself before it! It is a miracle."

The great bronze lamps were alight, and they cast reflections upon the still damp pavement about them. To either side, the trees of the Tuileries gardens and of the Cours la Reine and the Champs-Elysées lay in a solid black mass; in the middle, the obelisk rose slender and straight, its pointed top black against the sky; and beneath, the water of the Nèreid fountains splashed and gurgled. Far beyond, the gay lights of the rue Royale shone in a yellow cluster; and beyond these still, the tall columns of the Madeleine ended the long vista. Pedestrians and cabs crept across that vast space and seemed curiously little, like black insects, and round about it all the eight cities of France sat atop their stone pedestals and looked on. Ste. Marie gave a little sigh of pleasure, and the two moved forward, bearing to the left, toward the Champs-Elysées.

"And now," said he, "about these Benhams. What is the thing I cannot quite recall? What has happened to them?"

"I suppose," said the other man, "you mean the disappearance of Miss Benham's young brother a month ago--before you returned to Paris. Yes, that was certainly very odd--that is, it was either very odd or very commonplace. And in either case the family is terribly cut up about it. The boy's name was Arthur Benham, and he was rather a young fool, but not downright vicious, I should think. I never knew him at all well, but I know he spent his time chiefly at the Café de Paris and at the Olympia and at Longchamps and at Henry's Bar. Well, he just disappeared, that is all. He dropped completely out of sight between two days, and though the family has had a small army of detectives on his trail they've not discovered the smallest clew. It's deuced odd altogether. You might think it easy to disappear like that, but it's not."

"No--no," said Ste. Marie, thoughtfully. "No, I should fancy not.

"This boy," he said, after a pause--"I think I had seen him--had him pointed out to me--before I went away. I think it was at Henry's Bar, where all the young Americans go to drink strange beverages. I am quite sure I remember his face. A weak face, but not quite bad."

And after another little pause he asked:

"Was there any reason why he should have gone away--any quarrel or that sort of thing?"

"Well," said the other man, "I rather think there was something of the sort. The boy's uncle--Captain Stewart--middle-aged, rather prim old party--you'll have met him, I dare say--he intimated to me one day that there had been some trivial row. You see, the lad isn't of age yet, though he is to be in a few months, and so he has had to live on an allowance doled out by his grandfather, who's the head of the house. The boy's father is dead. There's a quaint old beggar, if you like--the grandfather. He was rather a swell in the diplomatic, in his day, it seems--rather an important swell. Now he's bedridden. He sits all day in bed and plays cards with his granddaughter or with a very superior valet, and talks politics with the men who come to see him. Oh yes, he's a quaint old beggar. He has a great quantity of white hair and an enormous square white beard and the fiercest eyes I ever saw, I should think. Everybody's frightened out of their wits of him. Well, he sits up there and rules his family in good old patriarchal style, and it seems he came down a bit hard on the poor boy one day over some folly or other, and there was a row and the boy went out of the house swearing he'd be even."

"Ah, well, then," said Ste. Marie, "the matter seems simple enough. A foolish boy's foolish pique. He is staying in hiding somewhere to frighten his grandfather. When he thinks the time favorable he will come back and be wept over and forgiven."

The other man walked a little way in silence.

"Ye-es," he said, at last. "Yes, possibly. Possibly you are right. That's what the grandfather thinks. It's the obvious solution. Unfortunately there is more or less against it. The boy went away with--so far as can be learned--almost no money, almost none at all. And he has already been gone a month. Miss Benham, his sister, is sure that something has happened to him, and I'm a bit inclined to think so, too. It's all very odd. I should think he might have been kidnapped but that no demand has been made for money."

"He was not," suggested Ste. Marie--"not the sort of young man to do anything desperate--make away with himself?" Hartley laughed.

"Oh, Lord, no!" said he. "Not that sort of young man at all. He was a very normal type of rich and spoiled and somewhat foolish American boy."

"Rich?" inquired the other, quickly.

"Oh yes; they're beastly rich. Young Arthur is to come into something very good at his majority, I believe, from his father's estate, and the old grandfather is said to be indecently rich--rolling in it! There's another reason why the young idiot wouldn't be likely to stop away of his own accord. He wouldn't risk anything like a serious break with the old gentleman. It would mean a loss of millions to him, I dare say, for the old beggar is quite capable of cutting him off if he takes the notion. Oh, it's a bad business all through."

And after they had gone on a bit he said it again, shaking his head:

"It's a bad business! That poor girl, you know. It's hard on her. She was fond of the young ass for some reason or other. She's very much broken up over it."

"Yes," said Ste. Marie, "it is hard for her--for all the family, of course. A bad business, as you say." He spoke absently, for he was looking ahead at something which seemed to be a motor accident. They had by this time got well up the Champs-Elysées and were crossing the Rond Point. A motor-car was drawn up alongside the curb just beyond, and a little knot of people stood about it and seemed to look at something on the ground.

"I think some one has been run down," said Ste. Marie. "Shall we have a look?" They quickened their pace and came to where the group of people stood in a circle looking upon the ground, and two gendarmes asked many questions and wrote voluminously in their little books. It appeared that a delivery boy mounted upon a tricycle cart had turned into the wrong side of the avenue and had got himself run into and overturned by a motor-car going at a moderate rate of speed. For once the sentiment of those mysterious birds of prey which flock instantaneously from nowhere round an accident, was against the victim and in favor of the frightened and gesticulating chauffeur.

Ste. Marie turned an amused face from this voluble being to the other occupants of the patently hired car, who stood apart, adding very little to the discussion. He saw a tall and bony man with very bright blue eyes and what is sometimes called a guardsman's mustache--the drooping, walruslike ornament which dates back a good many years now. Beyond this gentleman he saw a young woman in a long, gray silk coat and a motoring veil. He was aware that the tall man was staring at him rather fixedly and with a half-puzzled frown, as though he thought that they had met before and was trying to remember when, but Ste. Marie gave the man but a swift glance. His eyes were upon the dark face of the young woman beyond, and it seemed to him that she called aloud to him in an actual voice that rang in his ears. The young woman's very obvious beauty, he thought, had nothing to do with the matter. It seemed to him that her eyes called him. Just that. Something strange and very potent seemed to take sudden and almost tangible hold upon him--a charm, a spell, a magic--something unprecedented, new to his experience. He could not take his eyes from hers, and he stood staring.

As before, on the Pont de la Concorde, Hartley touched him on the arm, and abruptly the chains that had bound him were loosened.

"We must be going on, you know," the Englishman said, and Ste. Marie said, rather hurriedly:

"Yes, yes, to be sure! Come along!" But at a little distance he turned once more to look back. The chauffeur had mounted to his place, the delivery boy was upon his feet again, little the worse for his tumble, and the knot of bystanders had begun to disperse, but it seemed to Ste. Marie that the young woman in the long silk coat stood quite still where she had been, and that her face was turned toward him, watching.

"Did you notice that girl?" said Hartley, as they walked on at a brisker pace. "Did you see her face? She was rather a tremendous beauty, you know, in her gypsyish fashion. Yes, by Jove, she was!"

"Did I see her?" repeated Ste. Marie. "Yes. Oh yes. She had very strange eyes. At least, I think it was the eyes. I don't know. I've never seen any eyes quite like them. Very odd!"

He said something more in French which Hartley did not hear, and the Englishman saw that he was frowning.

"Oh, well, I shouldn't have said there was anything strange about them," Hartley said; "but they certainly were beautiful. There's no denying that. The man with her looked rather Irish, I thought."

They came to the Etoile, and cut across it toward the Avenue Hoche. Ste. Marie glanced back once more, but the motor-car and the delivery boy and the gendarmes were gone.

"What did you say?" he asked, idly.

"I said the man looked Irish," repeated his friend. All at once Ste. Marie gave a loud exclamation.

"Sacred thousand devils! Fool that I am! Dolt! Why didn't I think of it before?"

Hartley stared at him, and Ste. Marie stared down the Champs-Elysées like one in a trance.

"I say," said the Englishman, "we really must be getting on, you know; we're late." And as they went along down the Avenue Hoche, he demanded: "Why are you a dolt and whatever else it was? What struck you so suddenly?"

"I remembered all at once," said Ste. Marie, "where I had seen that man before and with whom I last saw him. I'll tell you about it later. Probably it's of no importance, though."

"You're talking rather like a mild lunatic," said the other. "Here we are at the house!"

II

THE LADDER TO THE STARS

Miss Benham was talking wearily to a strange, fair youth with an impediment in his speech, and was wondering why the youth had been asked to this house, where in general one was sure of meeting only interesting people, when some one spoke her name, and she turned with a little sigh of relief. It was Baron de Vries, the Belgian First Secretary of Legation, an old friend of her grandfather's, a man made gentle and sweet by infinite sorrow. He bowed civilly to the fair youth and bent over the girl's hand.

"It is very good," he said, "to see you again in the world. We have need of you, nous autres. Madame your mother is well, I hope--and the bear?" He called old Mr. Stewart "the bear" in a sort of grave jest, and that fierce octogenarian rather liked it.

"Oh yes," the girl said, "we're all fairly well. My mother had one of her headaches to-night and so didn't come here, but she's as well as usual, and 'the bear'--yes, he's well enough physically, I should think, but he has not been quite the same since--during the past month. It has told upon him, you know. He grieves over it much more than he will admit."

"Yes," said Baron de Vries, gravely. "Yes, I know." He turned about toward the fair young man, but that youth had drifted away and joined himself to another group. Miss Benham looked after him and gave a little exclamation of relief.

"That person was rather terrible," she said. "I can't think why he is here. Marian so seldom has dull people."

"I believe," said the Belgian, "that he is some connection of De Saulnes'. That explains his presence." He lowered his voice. "You have heard no--news? They have found no trace?"

"No," said she. "Nothing. Nothing at all. I'm rather in despair. It's all so hideously mysterious. I am sure, you know, that something has happened to him. It's--very, very hard. Sometimes I think I can't bear it. But I go on. We all go on."

Baron de Vries nodded his head strongly.

"That, my dear child, is just what you must do," said he. "You must go on. That is what needs the real courage, and you have courage. I am not afraid for you. And sooner or later you will hear of him--from him. It is impossible nowadays to disappear for very long. You will hear from him." He smiled at her, his slow, grave smile that was not of mirth but of kindness and sympathy and cheer.

"And if I may say so," he said, "you are doing very wisely to come out once more among your friends. You can accomplish no good by brooding at home. It is better to live one's normal life--even when it is not easy to do it. I say so who know."

The girl touched Baron de Vries' arm for an instant with her hand--a little gesture that seemed to express thankfulness and trust and affection.

"If all my friends were like you!" she said to him. And after that she drew a quick breath as if to have done with these sad matters, and she turned her eyes once more toward the broad room where the other guests stood in little groups, all talking at once, very rapidly and in loud voices.

"What extraordinarily cosmopolitan affairs these dinner-parties in new Paris are!" she said. "They're like diplomatic parties, only we have a better time and the men don't wear their orders. How many nationalities should you say there are in this room now?"

"Without stopping to consider," said Baron de Vries, "I say ten." They counted, and out of fourteen people there were represented nine races.

"I don't see Richard Hartley," Miss Benham said. "I had an idea he was to be here. Ah!" she broke off, looking toward the doorway. "Here he comes now!" she said. "He's rather late. Who is the Spanish-looking man with him, I wonder? He's rather handsome, isn't he?"

Baron de Vries moved a little forward to look, and exclaimed in his turn. He said:

"Ah, I did not know he was returned to Paris. That is Ste. Marie." Miss Benham's eyes followed the Spanish-looking young man as he made his way through the joyous greetings of friends toward his hostess.

"So that is Ste. Marie!" she said, still watching him. "The famous Ste. Marie!" She gave a little laugh.

"Well, I don't wonder at the reputation he bears for--gallantry and that sort of thing. He looks the part, doesn't he?"

"Ye-es," admitted her friend. "Yes, he is sufficiently beau garçon. But--yes--well, that is not all, by any means. You must not get the idea that Ste. Marie is nothing but a genial and romantic young squire-of-dames. He is much more than that. He has very fine qualities. To be sure, he appears to possess no ambition in particular, but I should be glad if he were my son. He comes of a very old house, and there is no blot upon the history of that house--nothing but faithfulness and gallantry and honor. And there is, I think, no blot upon Ste. Marie himself. He is fine gold."

The girl turned and stared at Baron de Vries with some astonishment.

"You speak very strongly," said she. "I have never heard you speak so strongly of any one, I think."

The Belgian made a little deprecatory gesture with his two hands, and he laughed.

"Oh, well, I like the boy. And I should hate to have you meet him for the first time under a misconception. Listen, my child! When a young man is loved equally by both men and women, by both old and young, that young man is worthy of friendship and trust. Everybody likes Ste. Marie. In a sense, that is his misfortune. The way is made too easy for him. His friends stand so thick about him that they shut off his view of the heights. To waken ambition in his soul he has need of solitude or misfortune or grief. Or," said the elderly Belgian, laughing gently--"or perhaps the other thing might do it best--the more obvious thing?"

The girl's raised eyebrows questioned him, and when he did not answer, she said:

"What thing, then?"

"Why, love," said Baron de Vries. "Love, to be sure. Love is said to work miracles, and I believe that to be a perfectly true saying. Ah, he is coming here!"

The Marquise de Saulnes, who was a very pretty little Englishwoman with a deceptively doll-like look, approached, dragging Ste. Marie in her wake. She said:

"My dearest dear, I give you of my best. Thank me and cherish him! I believe he is to lead you to the place where food is, isn't he?" She beamed over her shoulder and departed, and Miss Benham found herself confronted by the Spanish-looking man. Her first thought was that he was not as handsome as he had seemed at a distance, but something much better. For a young man she thought his face was rather oddly weather-beaten, as if he might have been very much at sea, and it was too dark to be entirely pleasing. But she liked his eyes, which were not brown or black, as she had expected, but a very unusual dark gray--a sort of slate color. And she liked his mouth, too, while disapproving of the fierce little upturned mustache which seemed to her a bit operatic. It was her habit--and it is not an unreliable habit--to judge people by their eyes and mouths. Ste. Marie's mouth pleased her because the lips were neither thin nor thick, they were not drawn into an unpleasant line by unpleasant habits, they did not pout as so many Latin lips do, and they had at one corner a humorous expression which she found curiously agreeable.

"You are to cherish me," Ste. Marie said. "Orders from headquarters. How does one cherish people?" The corner of his very expressive mouth twitched, and he grinned at her.

Miss Benham did not approve of young men who began an acquaintance in this very familiar manner. She thought that there was a certain preliminary and more formal stage which ought to be got through with first, but Ste, Marie's grin was irresistible. In spite of herself, she found that she was laughing.

"I don't quite know," she said. "It sounds rather appalling, doesn't it? Marian has such an extraordinary fashion of hurling people at each other's heads! She takes my breath away at times."

"Ah, well," said Ste. Marie, "perhaps we can settle upon something when I've led you to the place where food is. And, by-the-way, what are we waiting for? Are we not all here? There's an even number." He broke off with a sudden exclamation of pleasure; and when Miss Benham turned to look, she found that Baron de Vries, who had been talking to some friends, had once more come up to where she stood.

She watched the greeting between the two men, and its quiet affection impressed her very much. She knew Baron de Vries well, and she knew that it was not his habit to show or to feel a strong liking for young and idle men. This young man must be very worth while to have won the regard of that wise old Belgian. Just then Hartley, who had been barricaded behind a cordon of friends, came up to her in an abominable temper over his ill luck, and a few moments later the dinner procession was formed and they went in.

At table Miss Benham found herself between Ste. Marie and the same strange, fair youth who had afflicted her in the drawing-room. She looked upon him now with a sort of dismayed terror, but it developed that there was nothing to fear from the fair youth. He had no attention to waste upon social amenities. He fell upon his food with a wolfish passion extraordinary to see and also--alas!--to hear. Miss Benham turned from him to meet Ste. Marie's delighted eye.

"Tell him for me," begged that gentleman, "that soup should be seen--not heard."

But Miss Benham gave a little shiver of disgust. "I shall tell him nothing whatever," she said. "He's quite too dreadful, really! People shouldn't be exposed to that sort of thing. It's not only the noises. Plenty of very charming and estimable Germans, for example, make strange noises at table. But he behaves like a famished dog over a bone. I refuse to have anything to do with him. You must make up the loss to me, M. Ste. Marie. You must be as amusing as two people." She smiled across at him in her gravely questioning fashion. "I'm wondering," she said, "if I dare ask you a very personal question. I hesitate because I don't like people who presume too much upon a short acquaintance--and our acquaintance has been very, very short, hasn't it? even though we may have heard a great deal about each other beforehand. I wonder--"

"Oh, I should ask it if I were you!" said Ste. Marie, at once. "I'm an extremely good-natured person. And, besides, I quite naturally feel flattered at your taking interest enough to ask anything about me."

"Well," said she, "it's this: Why does everybody call you just 'Ste. Marie'? Most people are spoken of as Monsieur this or that--if there isn't a more august title; but they all call you Ste. Marie without any Monsieur. It seems rather odd."

Ste. Marie looked puzzled. "Why," he said, "I don't believe I know, just. I'd never thought of that. It's quite true, of course. They never do use a Monsieur or anything, do they? How cheeky of them! I wonder why it is? I'll ask Hartley."

He did ask Hartley later on, and Hartley didn't know, either. Miss Benham asked some other people, who were vague about it, and in the end she became convinced that it was an odd and quite inexplicable form of something like endearment. But nobody seemed to have formulated it to himself.

"The name is really 'De Ste. Marie,'" he went on, "and there's a title that I don't use, and a string of Christian names that one never employs. My people were Béarnais, and there's a heap of ruins on top of a hill in the Pyrenees where they lived. It used to be Ste. Marie de Mont-les-Roses, but afterward, after the Revolution, they called it Ste. Marie de Mont Perdu. My great-grandfather was killed there, but some old servants smuggled his little son away and saved him."

He seemed to Miss Benham to say that in exactly the right manner, not in the cheap and scoffing fashion which some young men affect in speaking of ancestral fortunes or misfortunes, nor with too much solemnity. And when she allowed a little silence to occur at the end, he did not go on with his family history, but turned at once to another subject. It pleased her curiously.

The fair youth at her other side continued to crouch over his food, making fierce and animal-like noises. He never spoke or seemed to wish to be spoken to, and Miss Benham found it easy to ignore him altogether. It occurred to her once or twice that Ste. Marie's other neighbor might desire an occasional word from him, but, after all, she said to herself that was his affair and beyond her control. So these two talked together through the entire dinner period, and the girl was aware that she was being much more deeply affected by the simple, magnetic charm of a man than ever before in her life. It made her a little angry, because she was unfamiliar with this sort of thing and distrusted it. She was rather a perfect type of that phenomenon before which the British and Continental world stands in mingled delight and exasperation--the American unmarried young woman, the creature of extraordinary beauty and still more extraordinary poise, the virgin with the bearing and savoir-faire of a woman of the world, the fresh-cheeked girl with the calm mind of a savante and the cool judgment, in regard to men and things, of an ambassador. The European world says she is cold, and that may be true; but it is well enough known that she can love very deeply. It says that, like most queens, and for precisely the same set of reasons, she later on makes a bad mother; but it is easy to point to queens who are the best of mothers. In short, she remains an enigma, and, like all other enigmas, forever fascinating.

Miss Benham reflected that she knew almost nothing about Ste. Marie save for his reputation as a carpet knight, and Baron de Vries' good opinion, which could not be despised. And that made her the more displeased when she realized how promptly she was surrendering to his charm. In a moment of silence she gave a sudden little laugh which seemed to express a half-angry astonishment.

"What was that for?" Ste. Marie demanded.

The girl looked at him for an instant and shook her head.

"I can't tell you," said she. "That's rude, isn't it? I'm sorry. Perhaps I will tell you one day, when we know each other better."

But inwardly she was saying: "Why, I suppose this is how they all begin--all these regiments of women who make fools of themselves about him! I suppose this is exactly what he does to them all!"

It made her angry, and she tried quite unfairly to shift the anger, as it were, to Ste. Marie--to put him somehow in the wrong. But she was by nature very just, and she could not quite do that, particularly as it was evident that the man was using no cheap tricks. He did not try to flirt with her, and he did not attempt to pay her veiled compliments, though she was often aware that when her attention was diverted for a few moments his eyes were always upon her, and that is a compliment that few women can find it in their hearts to resent.

"You say," said Ste. Marie, "'when we know each other better.' May one twist that into a permission to come and see you--I mean, really see you--not just leave a card at your door to-morrow by way of observing the formalities?"

"Yes," she said. "Oh yes, one may twist it into something like that without straining it unduly, I think. My mother and I shall be very glad to see you. I'm sorry she is not here to-night to say it herself."

Then the hostess began to gather together her flock, and so the two had no more speech. But when the women had gone and the men were left about the dismantled table, Hartley moved up beside Ste. Marie and shook a sad head at him. He said:

"You're a very lucky being. I was quietly hoping, on the way here, that I should be the fortunate man, but you always have all the luck. I hope you're decently grateful."

"Mon vieux," said Ste. Marie, "my feet are upon the stars. No!" He shook his head as if the figure displeased him. "No, my feet are upon the ladder to the stars. Grateful? What does a foolish word like grateful mean? Don't talk to me. You are not worthy to trample among my magnificent thoughts. I am a god upon Olympus."

"You said just now," objected the other man, practically, "that your feet were on a ladder. There are no ladders from Olympus to the stars."

"Ho!" said Ste. Marie. "Ho! Aren't there, though? There shall be ladders all over Olympus, if I like. What do you know about gods and stars? I shall be a god climbing to the heavens, and I shall be an angel of light, and I shall be a miserable worm grovelling in the night here below, and I shall be a poet, and I shall be anything else I happen to think of--all of them at once, if I choose. And you shall be the tongue-tied son of perfidious Albion that you are, gaping at my splendors from a fog-bank--a November fog-bank in May. Who is the desiccated gentleman bearing down upon us?"

III

STE. MARIE MAKES A VOW, BUT A PAIR OF EYES HAUNT HIM

Hartley looked over his shoulder and gave a little exclamation of distaste.

"It's Captain Stewart, Miss Benham's uncle," he said, lowering his voice. "I'm off. I shall abandon you to him. He's a good old soul, but he bores me." Hartley nodded to the man who was approaching, and then made his way to the end of the table, where their host sat discussing aero-club matters with a group of the other men.

Captain Stewart dropped into the vacant chair, saying: "May I recall myself to you, M. Ste. Marie? We met, I believe, once or twice, a couple of years ago. My name's Stewart."

Captain Stewart--the title was vaguely believed to have been borne some years before in the American service, but no one appeared to know much about it--was not an old man. He could not have been, at this time, much more than fifty, but English-speaking acquaintances often called him "old Stewart," and others "ce vieux Stewart." Indeed, at a first glance he might have passed for anything up to sixty, for his face was a good deal more lined and wrinkled than it should have been at his age. Ste. Marie's adjective had been rather apt. The man had a desiccated appearance. Upon examination, however, one saw that the blood was still red in his cheeks and lips, and, although his neck was thin and withered like an old man's, his brown eyes still held their fire. The hair was almost gone from the top of his large, round head, but it remained at the sides--stiff, colorless hair, with a hint of red in it. And there were red streaks in his gray mustache, which was trained outward in two loose tufts, like shaving-brushes. The mustache and the shallow chin under it gave him an odd, catlike appearance. Hartley, who rather disliked the man, used to insist that he had heard him mew.

Ste. Marie said something politely non-committal, though he did not at all remember the alleged meeting two years before, and he looked at Captain Stewart with a real curiosity and interest in his character as Miss Benham's uncle. He thought it very civil of the elder man to make these friendly advances when it was in no way incumbent upon him to do so.

"I noticed," said Captain Stewart, "that you were placed next my niece, Helen Benham, at dinner. This must be the first time you two have met, is it not? I remember speaking of you to her some months ago, and I am quite sure she said that she had not met you. Ah, yes, of course, you have been away from Paris a great deal since she and her mother--her mother is my sister: that is to say, my half-sister--have come here to live with my father." He gave a little gentle laugh. "I take an elderly uncle's privilege," he said, "of being rather proud of Helen. She is called very pretty, and she certainly has great poise."

Ste. Marie drew a quick breath, and his eyes began to flash as they had done a few moments before when he told Hartley that his feet were upon the ladder to the stars.

"Miss Benham!" he cried. "Miss Benham is--" He hung poised so for a moment, searching, as it were, for words of sufficient splendor, but in the end he shook his head and the gleam faded from his eyes. He sank back in his chair, sighing. "Miss Benham," said he, "is extremely beautiful."

And again her uncle emitted his little gentle laugh, which may have deceived Hartley into believing that he had heard the man mew. The sound was as much like mewing as it was like anything else.

"I am very glad," Captain Stewart said, "to see her come out once more into the world. She needs distraction. We--You may possibly have heard that the family is in great distress of mind over the disappearance of my young nephew. Helen has suffered particularly, because she is convinced that the boy has met with foul play. I myself think it very unlikely--very unlikely indeed. The lack of motive, for one thing, and for another--Ah, well, a score of reasons! But Helen refuses to be comforted. It seems to me much more like a boy's prank--his idea of revenge for what he considered unjust treatment at his grandfather's hands. He was always a headstrong youngster, and he has been a bit spoiled. Still, of course, the uncertainty is very trying for us all--very wearing."

"Of course," said Ste. Marie, gravely. "It is most unfortunate. Ah, by-the-way!" He looked up with a sudden interest. "A rather odd thing happened," he said, "as Hartley and I were coming here this evening. We walked up the Champs-Elysées from the Concorde, and on the way Hartley had been telling me of your nephew's disappearance. Near the Rond Point we came upon a motor-car which was drawn up at the side of the street--there had been an accident of no consequence, a boy tumbled over but not hurt. Well, one of the two occupants of the motor-car was a man whom I used to see about Maxim's and the Café de Paris and the Montmartre places, too, some time ago--a rather shady character whose name I've forgotten. The odd part of it all was that on the last occasion or two on which I saw your nephew he was with this man. I think it was in Henry's Bar. Of course, it means nothing at all. Your nephew doubtless knew scores of people, and this man is no more likely to have information about his present whereabouts than any of the others. Still, I should have liked to ask him. I didn't remember who he was till he had gone."

Captain Stewart shook his head sadly, frowning down upon the cigarette from which he had knocked the ash.

"I am afraid poor Arthur did not always choose his friends with the best of judgment," said he. "I am not squeamish, and I would not have boys kept in a glass case, but--yes, I'm afraid Arthur was not always too careful." He replaced the cigarette neatly between his lips. "This man, now--this man whom you saw to-night--what sort of looking man will he have been?"

"Oh, a tall, lean man," said Ste. Marie. "A tall man with blue eyes and a heavy, old-fashioned mustache. I just can't remember the name."

The smoke stood still for an instant over Captain Stewart's cigarette, and it seemed to Ste. Marie that a little contortion of anger fled across the man's face and was gone again. He stirred slightly in his chair. After a moment he said:

"I fancy, from your description--I fancy I know who the man was. If it is the man I am thinking of, the name is--Powers. He is, as you have said, a rather shady character, and I more than once warned my nephew against him. Such people are not good companions for a boy. Yes, I warned him."

"Powers," said Ste. Marie, "doesn't sound right to me, you know. I can't say the fellow's name myself, but I'm sure--that is, I think--it's not Powers."

"Oh yes," said Captain Stewart, with an elderly man's half-querulous certainty. "Yes, the name is Powers. I remember it well. And I remember--Yes, it was odd, was it not, your meeting him like that, just as you were talking of Arthur? You--oh, you didn't speak to him, you say? No, no, to be sure! You didn't recognize him at once. Yes, it was odd. Of course, the man could have had nothing to do with poor Arthur's disappearance. His only interest in the boy at any time would have been for what money Arthur might have, and he carried none, or almost none, away with him when he vanished. Eh, poor lad! Where can he be to-night, I wonder? It's a sad business, M. Ste. Marie--a sad business."

Captain Stewart fell into a sort of brooding silence, frowning down at the table before him, and twisting with his thin ringers the little liqueur glass and the coffee-cup which were there. Once or twice, Ste. Marie thought, the frown deepened and twisted into a sort of scowl, and the man's fingers twitched on the cloth of the table; but when at last the group at the other end of the board rose and began to move towards the door, Captain Stewart rose also and followed them. At the door he seemed to think of something, and touched Ste. Marie upon the arm.

"This--ah, Powers," he said, in a low tone--"this man whom you saw to-night! You said he was one of two occupants of a motor-car. Yes? Did you by any chance recognize the other?"

"Oh, the other was a young woman," said Ste. Marie. "No, I never saw her before. She was very handsome."

Captain Stewart said something under his breath and turned abruptly away. But an instant later he faced about once more, smiling. He said, in a man-of-the-world manner, which sat rather oddly upon him:

"Ah, well, we all have our little love-affairs. I dare say this shady fellow has his." And for some obscure reason Ste. Marie found the speech peculiarly offensive.

In the drawing-room he had opportunity for no more than a word with Miss Benham, for Hartley, enraged over his previous ill success, cut in ahead of him and manoeuvred that young lady into a corner, where he sat before her, turning a square and determined back to the world. Ste. Marie listlessly played bridge for a time, but his attention was not upon it, and he was glad when the others at the table settled their accounts and departed to look in at a dance somewhere. After that he talked for a little with Marian de Saulnes, whom he liked and who made no secret of adoring him. She complained loudly that he was in a vile temper, which was not true; he was only restless and distrait and wanted to be alone; and so, at last, he took his leave without waiting for Hartley.

Outside, in the street, he stood for a moment, hesitating, and an expectant fiacre drew up before the house, the cocher raising an interrogative whip. In the end Ste. Marie shook his head and turned away on foot. It was a still, sweet night of soft airs, and a moonless, starlit sky, and the man was very fond of walking in the dark. From the Etoile he walked down the Champs-Elysées, but presently turned toward the river. His eyes were upon the mellow stars, his feet upon the ladder thereunto. He found himself crossing the Pont des Invalides, and halted midway to rest and look. He laid his arms upon the bridge's parapet and turned his face outward. Against it bore a little gentle breeze that smelled of the purifying water below and of the night and of green things growing. Beneath him the river ran black as flowing ink, and across its troubled surface the many-colored lights of the many bridges glittered very beautifully, swirling arabesques of gold and crimson. The noises of the city--beat of hoofs upon wooden pavements, horn of train or motor-car, jingle of bell upon cab-horse--came here faintly and as if from a great distance. Above the dark trees of the Cours la Reine the sky glowed, softly golden, reflecting the million lights of Paris.

Ste. Marie closed his eyes, and against darkness he saw the beautiful head of Helen Benham, the clear-cut, exquisite modelling of feature and contour, the perfection of form and color. Her eyes met his eyes, and they were very serene and calm and confident. She smiled at him, and the new contours into which her face fell with the smile were more perfect than before. He watched the turn of her head, and the grace of the movement was the uttermost effortless grace one dreams that a queen should have. The heart of Ste. Marie quickened in him, and he would have gone down upon his knees.

He was well aware that with the coming of this girl something unprecedented, wholly new to his experience, had befallen him--an awakening to a new life. He had been in love a very great many times. He was usually in love. And each time his heart had gone through the same sweet and bitter anguish, the same sleepless nights had come and gone upon him, the eternal and ever new miracle had wakened spring in his soul, had passed its summer solstice, had faded through autumnal regrets to winter's death; but through it all something within him had waited asleep.

He found himself wondering dully what it was--wherein lay the great difference?--and he could not answer the question he asked. He knew only that whereas before he had loved, he now went down upon prayerful knees to worship. In a sudden poignant thrill the knightly fervor of his forefathers came upon him, and he saw a sweet and golden lady set far above him upon a throne. Her clear eyes gazed afar, serene and untroubled. She sat wrapped in a sort of virginal austerity, unaware of the base passions of men. The other women whom Ste. Marie had--as he was pleased to term it--loved had certainly come at least half-way to meet him, and some of them had come a good deal farther than that. He could not, by the wildest flight of imagination, conceive this girl doing anything of that sort. She was to be won by trial and high endeavor, by prayer and self-purification--not captured by a warm eye-glance, a whispered word, a laughing kiss. In fancy he looked from the crowding cohorts of these others to that still, sweet figure set on high, wrapped in virginal austerity, calm in her serene perfection, and his soul abased itself before her. He knelt in an awed and worshipful adoration.

So before quest or tournament or battle must those elder Ste. Maries--Ste. Maries de Mont-les-Roses---have knelt, each knight at the feet of his lady, each knightly soul aglow with the chaste ardor of chivalry.

The man's hands tightened upon the parapet of the bridge, he lifted his face again to the shining stars where-among, as his fancy had it, she sat enthroned. Exultingly he felt under his feet the rungs of the ladder, and in the darkness he swore a great oath to have done forever with blindness and grovelling, to climb and climb, forever to climb, until at last he should stand where she was--cleansed and made worthy by long endeavor--at last meet her eyes and touch her hand.

It was a fine and chivalric frenzy, and Ste. Marie was passionately in earnest about it, but his guardian angel--indeed, Fate herself--must have laughed a little in the dark, knowing what manner of man he was in less exalted hours.

It was an odd freak of memory that at last recalled him to earth. Every man knows that when a strong and, for the moment, unavailing effort has been made to recall something lost to mind, the memory, in some mysterious fashion, goes on working long after the attention has been elsewhere diverted, and sometimes hours afterward, or even days, produces quite suddenly and inappropriately the lost article. Ste. Marie had turned, with a little sigh, to take up, once more, his walk across the Pont des Invalides, when seemingly from nowhere, and certainly by no conscious effort, a name flashed into his mind. He said it aloud:

"O'Hara! O'Hara! That tall, thin chap's name was O'Hara, by Jove! It wasn't Powers at all!" He laughed a little as he remembered how very positive Captain Stewart had been. And then he frowned, thinking that the mistake was an odd one, since Stewart had evidently known a good deal about this adventurer. Captain Stewart, though, Ste. Marie reflected, was exactly the sort to be very sure he was right about things. He had just the neat and precise and semi-scholarly personality of the man who always knows. So Ste. Marie dismissed the matter with another brief laugh, but a cognate matter was less easy to dismiss. The name brought with it a face--a dark and splendid face with tragic eyes that called. He walked a long way thinking about them and wondering. The eyes haunted him. It will have been reasonably evident that Ste. Marie was a fanciful and imaginative soul. He needed but a chance word, the sight of a face in a crowd, the glance of an eye, to begin story-building, and he would go on for hours about it and work himself up to quite a passion with his imaginings. He should have been a writer of fiction.

He began forthwith to construct romances about this lady of the motor-car. He wondered why she should have been with the shady Irishman--if Irishman he was--O'Hara, and with some anxiety he wondered what the two were to each other. Captain Stewart's little cynical jest came to his mind, and he was conscious of a sudden desire to kick Miss Benham's middle-aged uncle.

The eyes haunted him. What was it they suffered? Out of what misery did they call--and for what? He walked all the long way home to his little flat overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens, haunted by those eyes. As he climbed his stair it suddenly occurred to him that they had quite driven out of his mind the image of his beautiful lady who sat among the stars, and the realization came to him with a shock.

IV

OLD DAVID STEWART

It was Miss Benham's custom, upon returning home at night from dinner-parties or other entertainments, to look in for a few minutes on her grandfather before going to bed. The old gentleman, like most elderly people, slept lightly, and often sat up in bed very late into the night, reading or playing piquet with his valet. He suffered hideously at times from the malady which was killing him by degrees, but when he was free from pain the enormous recuperative power, which he had preserved to his eighty-sixth year, left him almost as vigorous and clear-minded as if he had never been ill at all. Hartley's description of him had not been altogether a bad one: "a quaint old beggar... a great quantity of white hair and an enormous square white beard and the fiercest eyes I ever saw..." He was a rather "quaint old beggar," indeed! He had let his thick, white hair grow long, and it hung down over his brows in unparted locks as the ancient Greeks wore their hair. He had very shaggy eyebrows, and the deep-set eyes under them gleamed from the shadow with a fierceness which was rather deceptive but none the less intimidating. He had a great beak of a nose, but the mouth below could not be seen. It was hidden by the mustache and the enormous square beard. His face was colorless, almost as white as hair and beard; there seemed to be no shadow or tint anywhere except the cavernous recesses from which the man's eyes gleamed and sparkled. Altogether he was certainly "a quaint old beggar."

He had, during the day and evening, a good many visitors, for the old gentleman's mind was as alert as it ever had been, and important men thought him worth consulting. The names which the admirable valet Peters announced from time to time were names which meant a great deal in the official and diplomatic world of the day. But if old David felt flattered over the unusual fashion in which the great of the earth continued to come to him, he never betrayed it. Indeed, it is quite probable that this view of the situation never once occurred to him. He had been thrown with the great of the earth for more than half a century, and he had learned to take it as a matter of course.

On her return from the Marquise de Saulnes' dinner-party, Miss Benham went at once to her grandfather's wing of the house, which had its own street entrance, and knocked lightly at his door. She asked the admirable Peters, who opened to her, "Is he awake?" and being assured that he was, went into the vast chamber, dropping her cloak on a chair as she entered.

David Stewart was sitting up in his monumental bed behind a sort of invalid's table which stretched across his knees without touching them. He wore over his night-clothes a Chinese mandarin's jacket of old red satin, wadded with down, and very gorgeously embroidered with the cloud and bat designs, and with large round panels of the imperial five-clawed dragon in gold. He had a number of these jackets--they seemed to be his one vanity in things external--and they were so made that they could be slipped about him without disturbing him in his bed, since they hung down only to the waist or thereabouts. They kept the upper part of his body, which was not covered by the bedclothes, warm, and they certainly made him a very impressive figure.

He said: "Ah, Helen! Come in! Come in! Sit down on the bed there and tell me what you have been doing!" He pushed aside the pack of cards which was spread out on the invalid's table before him, and with great care counted a sum of money in francs and half-francs and nickel twenty-five centime pieces. "I've won seven francs fifty from Peters to-night," he said, chuckling gently. "That is a very good evening, indeed. Very good! Where have you been, and who were there?"

"A dinner-party at the De Saulnes'," said Miss Benham, making herself comfortable on the side of the great bed. "It's a very pleasant place. Marian is, of course, a dear, and they're quite English and unceremonious. You can talk to your neighbor at dinner instead of addressing the house from a platform, as it were. French dinner-parties make me nervous."

Old David gave a little growling laugh.

"French dinner-parties at least keep people up to the mark in the art of conversation," said he. "But that is a lost art, anyhow, nowadays, so I suppose one might as well be quite informal and have done with it. Who were there?"

"Oh, well"--she considered, "no one, I should think, who would interest you. Rather an indifferent set. Pleasant people, but not inspiring. The Marquis had some young relative or connection who was quite odious and made the most surprising noises over his food. I met a new man whom I think I am going to like very much, indeed. He wouldn't interest you, because he doesn't mean anything in particular, and of course he oughtn't to interest me for the same reason. He's just an idle, pleasant young man, but--he has great charm--very great charm. His name is Ste. Marie. Baron de Vries seems very fond of him, which surprised me, rather."

"Ste. Marie!" exclaimed the old gentleman, in obvious astonishment. "Ste. Marie de Mont Perdu?"

"Yes," she said. "Yes, that is the name, I believe. You know him, then? I wonder he didn't mention it."

"I knew his father," said old David. "And his grandfather, for that matter. They're Gascon, I think, or Béarnais; but this boy's mother will have been Irish, unless his father married again.

"So you've been meeting a Ste. Marie, have you?--and finding that he has great charm?" The old gentleman broke into one of his growling laughs, and reached for a long black cigar, which he lighted, eying his granddaughter the while over the flaring match. "Well," he said, when the cigar was drawing, "they all have had charm. I should think there has never been a Ste. Marie without it. They're a sort of embodiment of romance, that family. This boy's great-grandfather lost his life defending a castle against a horde of peasants in 1799; his grandfather was killed in the French campaign in Mexico in '39--at Vera Cruz it was, I think; and his father died in a filibustering expedition ten years ago. I wonder what will become of the last Ste. Marie?" Old David's eyes suddenly sharpened. "You're not going to fall in love with Ste. Marie and marry him, are you?" he demanded.

Miss Benham gave a little angry laugh, but her grandfather saw the color rise in her cheeks for all that.

"Certainly not," she said, with great decision, "What an absurd idea! Because I meet a man at a dinner-party and say I like him, must I marry him to-morrow? I meet a great many men at dinners and things, and a few of them I like. Heavens!"

"'Methinks the lady doth protest too much,'" muttered old David into his huge beard.

"I beg your pardon?" asked Miss Benham, politely.

But he shook his head, still growling inarticulately, and began to draw enormous clouds of smoke from the long black cigar. After a time he took the cigar once more from his lips and looked thoughtfully at his granddaughter, where she sat on the edge of the vast bed, upright and beautiful, perfect in the most meticulous detail. Most women when they return from a long evening out look more or less the worse for it--deadened eyes, pale cheeks, loosened coiffure tell their inevitable tale. Miss Benham looked as if she had just come from the hands of a very excellent maid. She looked as freshly soignée as she might have looked at eight that evening instead of at one. Not a wave of her perfectly undulated hair was loosened or displaced, not a fold of the lace at her breast had departed from its perfect arrangement.

"It is odd," said old David Stewart, "your taking a fancy to young Ste. Marie. Of course, it's natural, too, in a way, because you are complete opposites, I should think--that is, if this lad is like the rest of his race. What I mean is that merely attractive young men don't, as a rule, attract you."

"Well, no," she admitted, "they don't usually. Men with brains attract me most, I think--men who are making civilization, men who are ruling the world, or at least doing important things for it. That's your fault, you know. You taught me that."

The old gentleman laughed.

"Possibly," said he. "Possibly. Anyhow, that is the sort of men you like, and they like you. You're by no means a fool, Helen; in fact, you're a woman with brains. You could wield great influence married to the proper sort of man."

"But not to M. Ste. Marie," she suggested, smiling across at him.

"Well, no," he said. "No, not to Ste. Marie. It would be a mistake to marry Ste. Marie--if he is what the rest of his house have been. The Ste. Maries live a life compounded of romance and imagination and emotion. You're not emotional."

"No," said Miss Benham, slowly and thoughtfully. It was as if the idea were new to her. "No, I'm not, I suppose. No. Certainly not."

"As a matter of fact," said old David, "you're by nature rather cold. I'm not sure it isn't a good thing. Emotional people, I observe, are usually in hot water of some sort. When you marry you're very likely to choose with a great deal of care and some wisdom. And you're also likely to have what is called a career. I repeat that you could wield great influence in the proper environment."

The girl frowned across at her grandfather reflectively.

"Do you mean by that," she asked, after a little silence--"do you mean that you think I am likely to be moved by sheer ambition and nothing else in arranging my life? I've never thought of myself as a very ambitious person."

"Let us substitute for ambition common-sense," said old David. "I think you have a great deal of common-sense for a woman--and so young a woman. How old are you by-the-way? Twenty-two? Yes, to be sure. I think you have great common-sense and appreciation of values. And I think you're singularly free of the emotionalism that so often plays hob with them all. People with common-sense fall in love in the right places."

"I don't quite like the sound of it," said Miss Benham. "Perhaps I am rather ambitious--I don't know. Yes, perhaps. I should like to play some part in the world, I don't deny that. But--am I as cold as you say? I doubt it very much. I doubt that."

"You're twenty-two," said her grandfather, "and you have seen a good deal of society in several capitals. Have you ever fallen in love?"

Oddly, the face of Ste. Marie came before Miss Benham's eyes as if she had summoned it there. But she frowned a little and shook her head, saying:

"No, I can't say that I have. But that means nothing. There's plenty of time for that. And you know," she said, after a pause--"you know I'm rather sure I could fall in love--pretty hard. I'm sure of that. Perhaps I have been waiting. Who knows?"

"Aye, who knows?" said David. He seemed all at once to lose interest in the subject, as old people often do without apparent reason, for he remained silent for a long time, puffing at the long black cigar or rolling it absently between his fingers. After awhile he laid it down in a metal dish which stood at his elbow, and folded his lean hands before him over the invalid's table. He was still so long that at last his granddaughter thought he had fallen asleep, and she began to rise from her seat, taking care to make no noise; but at that the old man stirred and put out his hand once more for the cigar. "Was young Richard Hartley at your dinner-party?" he asked, and she said:

"Yes. Oh yes, he was there. He and M. Ste. Marie came together, I believe. They are very close friends."

"Another idler," growled old David. "The fellow's a man of parts--and a man of family. What's he idling about here for? Why isn't he in Parliament, where he belongs?"

"Well," said the girl, "I should think it is because he is too much a man of family--as you put it. You see, he'll succeed his cousin, Lord Risdale, before very long, and then all his work would have been for nothing, because he'll have to take his seat in the Lords. Lord Risdale is unmarried, you know, and a hopeless invalid. He may die any day. I think I sympathize with poor Mr. Hartley. It would be a pity to build up a career for one's self in the lower House, and then suddenly, in the midst of it, have to give it all up. The situation is rather paralyzing to endeavor, isn't it?"

"Yes, I dare say," said old David, absently. He looked up sharply. "Young Hartley doesn't come here as much as he used to do."

"No," said Miss Benham, "he doesn't." She gave a little laugh. "To avoid cross-examination," she said, "I may as well admit that he asked me to marry him and I had to refuse. I'm sorry, because I like him very much, indeed."

Old David made an inarticulate sound which may have been meant to express surprise--or almost anything else. He had not a great range of expression.

"I don't want," said he, "to seem to have gone daft on the subject of marriage, and I see no reason why you should be in any haste about it. Certainly I should hate to lose you, my child, but--Hartley as the next Lord Risdale is undoubtedly a good match. And you say you like him."

The girl looked up with a sort of defiance, and her face was a little flushed.

"I don't love him," she said. "I like him immensely, but I don't love him, and, after all--well, you say I'm cold, and I admit I'm more or less ambitious, but, after all--well, I just don't quite love him. I want to love the man I marry."

Old David Stewart held up his black cigar and gazed thoughtfully at the smoke which streamed thin and blue and veil-like from its lighted end.

"Love!" he said, in a reflective tone. "Love!" He repeated the word two or three times slowly, and he stirred a little in his bed. "I have forgotten what it is," said he. "I expect I must be very old. I have forgotten what love--that sort of love--is like. It seems very far away to me and rather unimportant. But I remember that I thought it important enough once, a century or two ago. Do you know, it strikes me as rather odd that I have forgotten what love is like. It strikes me as rather pathetic." He gave a sort of uncouth grimace and stuck the black cigar once more into his mouth. "Egad!" said he, mumbling indistinctly over the cigar, "how foolish love seems when you look back at it across fifty or sixty years!"

Miss Benham rose to her feet smiling, and she came and stood near where the old man lay propped up against his pillows. She touched his cheek with her cool hand, and old David put up one of his own hands and patted it.

"I'm going to bed now," said she. "I've sat here talking too long. You ought to be asleep, and so ought I."

"Perhaps! Perhaps!" the old man said. "I don't feel sleepy, though. I dare say I shall read a little." He held her hand in his and looked up at her.

"I've been talking a great deal of nonsense about marriage," said he. "Put it out of your head! It's all nonsense. I don't want you to marry for a long time. I don't want to lose you." His face twisted a little, quite suddenly. "You're precious near all I have left, now," he said.

The girl did not answer at once, for it seemed to her that there was nothing to say. She knew that her grandfather was thinking of the lost boy, and she knew what a bitter blow the thing had been to him. She often thought that it would kill him before his old malady could run its course.

But after a moment she said, very gently: "We won't give up hope. We'll never give up hope. Think! he might come home to-morrow! Who knows?"

"If he has stayed away of his own accord," cried out old David Stewart, in a loud voice, "I'll never forgive him--not if he comes to me to-morrow on his knees! Not even if he comes to me on his knees!"

The girl bent over her grandfather, saying: "Hush! hush! You mustn't excite yourself." But old David's gray face was working, and his eyes gleamed from their cavernous shadows with a savage fire.

"If the boy is staying away out of spite," he repeated, "he need never come back to me. I won't forgive him." He beat his unemployed hand upon the table before him, and the things which lay there jumped and danced. "And if he waits until I'm dead and then comes back," said he, "he'll find he has made a mistake--a great mistake. He'll find a surprise in store for him, I can tell you that. I won't tell you what I have done, but it will be a disagreeable surprise for Master Arthur, you may be sure."

The old gentleman fell to frowning and muttering in his choleric fashion, but the fierce glitter began to go out of his eyes and his hands ceased to tremble and clutch at the things before him. The girl was silent, because again there seemed to her to be nothing that she could say. She longed very much to plead her brother's cause, but she was sure that would only excite her grandfather, and he was growing quieter after his burst of anger. She bent down over him and kissed his cheek.

"Try to go to sleep," she said. "And don't torture yourself with thinking about all this. I'm as sure that poor Arthur is not staying away out of spite as if he were myself. He's foolish and headstrong, but he's not spiteful, dear. Try to believe that. And now I'm really going. Good-night." She kissed him again and slipped out of the room. And as she closed the door she heard her grandfather pull the bell-cord which hung beside him and summoned the excellent Peters from the room beyond.

V

JASON SETS FORTH UPON THE GREAT ADVENTURE

Miss Benham stood at one of the long drawing-room windows of the house in the rue de l'Université, and looked out between the curtains upon the rather grimy little garden, where a few not very prosperous cypresses and chestnuts stood guard over the rows of lilac shrubs and the box-bordered flower-beds and the usual moss-stained fountain. She was thinking of the events of the past month, the month which had elapsed since the evening of the De Saulnes' dinner-party. They were not at all startling events; in a practical sense there were no events at all, only a quiet sequence of affairs which was about as inevitable as the night upon the day--the day upon the night again. In a word, this girl, who had considered herself very strong and very much the mistress of her feelings, found, for the first time in her life, that her strength was as nothing at all against the potent charm and magnetism of a man who had almost none of the qualities she chiefly admired in men. During the month's time she had passed from a phase of angry self-scorn through a period of bewilderment not unmixed with fear, and from that she had come into an unknown world, a land very strange to her, where old standards and judgments seemed to be valueless--a place seemingly ruled altogether by new emotions, sweet and thrilling, or full of vague terrors as her mood veered here or there.

That sublimated form of guesswork which is called "woman's intuition" told her that Ste. Marie would come to her on this afternoon, and that something in the nature of a crisis would have to be faced. It can be proved even by poor masculine mathematics that guesswork, like other gambling ventures, is bound to succeed about half the time, and it succeeded on this occasion. Even as Miss Benham stood at the window looking out through the curtains, M. Ste. Marie was announced from the doorway.

She turned to meet him with a little frown of determination, for in his absence she was often very strong, indeed, and sometimes she made up and rehearsed little speeches of great dignity and decision in which she told him that he was attempting a quite hopeless thing, and, as a well-wishing friend, advised him to go away and attempt it no longer. But as Ste. Marie came quickly across the room toward her, the little frown wavered and at last fled from her face and another look came there. It was always so. The man's bodily presence exerted an absolute spell over her.

"I have been sitting with your grandfather for half an hour," Ste. Marie said. And she said:

"Oh, I'm glad! I'm very glad! You always cheer him up. He hasn't been too cheerful or too well of late." She unnecessarily twisted a chair about, and after a moment sat down in it. And she gave a little laugh. "This friendship which has grown up between my grandfather and you," said she--"I don't understand it at all. Of course, he knew your father and all that; but you two seem such very different types, I shouldn't think you would amuse each other at all. There's Mr. Hartley, for example. I should expect my grandfather to like him very much better than you, but he doesn't--though I fancy he approves of him much more."

She laughed again, but a different laugh; and when he heard it Ste. Marie's eyes gleamed a little and his hands moved beside him.

"I expect," said she--"I expect, you know, that he just likes you without stopping to think why--as everybody else does. I fancy it's just that. What do you think?"

"Oh, I?" said the man. "I--how should I know? I know it's a great privilege to be allowed to see him--such a man as that. And I know we get on wonderfully well. He doesn't condescend, as most old men do who have led important lives. We just talk as two men in a club might talk, and I tell him stories and make him laugh. Oh yes, we get on wonderfully well."

"Oh," said she, "I've often wondered what you talk about. What did you talk about to-day?"

Ste. Marie turned abruptly away from her and went across to one of the windows--the window where she had stood earlier, looking out upon the dingy garden. She saw him stand there, with his back turned, the head a little bent, the hands twisting together behind him, and a sudden fit of nervous shivering wrung her. Every woman knows when a certain thing is going to be said to her, and usually she is prepared for it, though usually, also, she says she is not. Miss Benham knew what was coming now, and she was frightened, not of Ste. Marie, but of herself. It meant so very much to her--more than to most women at such a time. It meant, if she said yes to him, the surrender of almost all the things she had cared for and hoped for. It meant the giving up of that career which old David Stewart had dwelt upon a month ago.

Ste. Marie turned back into the room. He came a little way toward where the girl sat, and halted, and she could see that he was very pale. A sort of critical second self noticed that he was pale and was surprised, because, although men's faces often turn red, they seldom turn noticeably pale except in very great nervous crises--or in works of fiction; while women, on the contrary, may turn red and white twenty times a day, and no harm done. He raised his hands a little way from his sides in the beginning of a gesture, but they dropped again as if there was no strength in them.

"I told him," said Ste. Marie, in a flat voice--"I told your grandfather that I--loved you more than anything in this world or in the next. I told him that my love for you had made another being of me--a new being. I told him that I wanted to come to you and to kneel at your feet, and to ask you if you could give me just a little, little hope--something to live for, a light to climb toward. That is what we talked about, your grandfather and I."

"Ste. Marie! Ste. Marie!" said the girl, in a half whisper. "What did my grandfather say to you?" she asked, after a silence.

Ste. Marie looked away.

"I cannot tell you," he said. "He--was not quite sympathetic."

The girl gave a little cry.

"Tell me what he said!" she demanded. "I must know what he said."

The man's eyes pleaded with her, but she held him with her gaze, and in the end he gave in.

"He said I was a damned fool," said Ste. Marie.

And the girl, after an instant of staring, broke into a little fit of nervous, overwrought laughter, and covered her face with her hands.

He threw himself upon his knees before her, and her laughter died away. An Englishman or an American cannot do that. Richard Hartley, for example, would have looked like an idiot upon his knees, and he would have felt it. But it did not seem extravagant with Ste. Marie. It became him.

"Listen! Listen!" he cried to her, but the girl checked him before he could go on.

She dropped her hands from her face, and she bent a little forward over the man as he knelt there. She put out her hands and took his head for a swift instant between them, looking down into his eyes. At the touch a sudden wave of tenderness swept her--almost an engulfing wave; it almost overwhelmed her and bore her away from the land she knew. And so when she spoke her voice was not quite steady. She said:

"Ah, dear Ste. Marie! I cannot pretend to be cold toward you. You have laid a spell upon me, Ste. Marie. You enchant us all, somehow, don't you? I suppose I'm not so different from the others as I thought I was. And yet," she said, "he was right, you know. My grandfather was right. No, let me talk, now. I must talk for a little. I must try to tell you how it is with me--try somehow to find a way. He was right. He meant that you and I were utterly unsuited to each other, and so, in calm moments, I know we are. I know that well enough. When you're not with me, I feel very sure about it. I think of a thousand excellent reasons why you and I ought to be no more to each other than friends. Do you know, I think my grandfather is a little uncanny. I think he has prophetic powers. They say very old people often have. He and I talked about you when I came home from that dinner-party at the De Saulnes', a month ago--the dinner-party where you and I first met. I told him that I had met a man whom I liked very much--a man with great charm; and though I must have said the same sort of thing to him before about other men, he was quite oddly disturbed, and talked for a long time about it--about the sort of man I ought to marry and the sort I ought not to marry. It was unusual for him. He seldom says anything of that kind. Yes, he is right. You see, I'm ambitious in a particular way. If I marry at all I ought to marry a man who is working hard in politics or in something of that kind. I could help him. We could do a great deal together."

"I could go into politics!" cried Ste. Marie; but she shook her head, smiling down upon him.

"No, not you, my dear. Politics least of all. You could be a soldier, if you chose. You could fight as your father and your grandfather and the others of your house have done. You could lead a forlorn hope in the field. You could suffer and starve and go on fighting. You could die splendidly, but--politics, no! That wants a tougher shell than you have. And a soldier's wife! Of what use to him is she?"

Ste. Marie's face was very grave. He looked up to her, smiling.

"Do you set ambition before love, my Queen?" he asked, and she did not answer him at once.

She looked into his eyes, and she was as grave as he.

"Is love all?" she said, at last. "Is love all? Ought one to think of nothing but love when one is settling one's life forever? I wonder? I look about me, Ste. Marie," she said, "and in the lives of my friends--the people who seem to me to be most worth while, the people who are making the world's history for good or ill--and it seems to me that in their lives love has the second place--or the third. I wonder if one has the right to set it first. There is, of course," she said, "the merely domestic type of woman--the woman who has no thought and no interest beyond her home. I am not that type of woman. Perhaps I wish I were. Certainly they are the happiest. But I was brought up among--well, among important people--men of my grandfather's kind. All my training has been toward that life. Have I the right, I wonder, to give it all up?"

The man stirred at her feet, and she put out her hands to him quickly.

"Do I seem brutal?" she cried. "Oh, I don't want to be! Do I seem very ungenerous and wrapped up in my own side of the thing? I don't mean to be that, but--I'm not sure. I expect it's that. I'm not sure, and I think I'm a little frightened." She gave him a brief, anxious smile that was not without its tenderness. "I'm so sure," she said, "when I'm away from you. But when you're here--oh, I forget all I've thought of. You lay your spell upon me."

Ste. Marie gave a little wordless cry of joy. He caught her two hands in his and held them against his lips. Again that great wave of tenderness swept her, almost engulfing. But when it had ebbed she sank back once more in her chair, and she withdrew her hands from his clasp.

"You make me forget too much," she said. "I think you make me forget everything that I ought to remember. Oh, Ste. Marie, have I any right to think of love and happiness while this terrible mystery is upon us--while we don't know whether poor Arthur is alive or dead? You've seen what it has brought my grandfather to! It is killing him. He has been much worse in the past fortnight. And my mother is hardly a ghost of herself in these days. Ah, it is brutal of me to think of my own affairs--to dream of happiness at such a time." She smiled across at him very sadly. "You see what you have brought me to!" she said.

Ste. Marie rose to his feet. If Miss Benham, absorbed in that warfare which raged within her, had momentarily forgotten the cloud of sorrow under which her household lay, so much the more had he, to whom the sorrow was less intimate, forgotten it. But he was ever swift to sympathy, Ste. Marie--as quick as a woman, and as tender. He could not thrust his love upon the girl at such a time as this. He turned a little away from her, and so remained for a moment. When he faced about again the flush had gone from his cheeks and the fire from his eyes. Only tenderness was left there.

"There has been no news at all this week?" he asked, and the girl shook her head.

"None! None! Shall we ever have news of him, I wonder? Must we go on always and never know? It seems to me almost incredible that any one could disappear so completely. And yet, I dare say, many people have done it before and have been as carefully sought for. If only I could believe that he is alive! If only I could believe that!"

"I believe it," said Ste. Marie.

"Ah," she said, "you say that to cheer me. You have no reason to offer."

"Dead bodies very seldom disappear completely," said he. "If your brother died anywhere there would be a record of the death. If he were accidentally killed there would be a record of that, too; and, of course, you are having all such records constantly searched?"

"Oh yes," she said. "Yes, of course--at least, I suppose so. My uncle has been directing the search. Of course, he would take an obvious precaution like that."

"Naturally," said Ste. Marie. "Your uncle, I should say, is an unusually careful man." He paused a moment to smile. "He makes his little mistakes, though. I told you about that man O'Hara, and about how sure Captain Stewart was that the name was Powers. Do you know"--Ste. Marie had been walking up and down the room, but he halted to face her--"do you know, I have a very strong feeling that if one could find this man O'Hara, one would learn something about what became of your brother? I have no reason for thinking that, but I feel it."

"Oh," said the girl, doubtfully, "I hardly think that could be so. What motive could the man have for harming my brother?"

"None," said Ste. Marie; "but he might have an excellent motive for hiding him away--kidnapping him. Is that the word? Yes, I know, you're going to say that no demand has been made for money, and that is where my argument--if I can call it an argument--is weak. But the fellow may be biding his time. Anyhow, I should like to have five minutes alone with him. I'll tell you another thing. It's a trifle, and it may be of no consequence, but I add it to my vague and--if you like--foolish feeling, and make something out of it. I happened, some days ago, to meet at the Café de Paris a man who I knew used to know this O'Hara. He was not, I think, a friend of his at all, but an acquaintance. I asked him what had become of O'Hara, saying that I hadn't seen him in some weeks. Well, this man said O'Hara had gone away somewhere a couple of months ago. He didn't seem at all surprised, for it appears the Irishman--if he is an Irishman--is decidedly a haphazard sort of person, here to-day, gone to-morrow. No, the man wasn't surprised, but he was rather angry, because he said O'Hara owed him some money. I said I thought he must be mistaken about the fellow's absence, because I'd seen him in the street within the month--on the evening of our dinner-party, you remember--but this man was very sure that I had made a mistake. He said that if O'Hara had been in town he was sure to have known it. Well, the point is here. Your brother disappears at a certain time. At the same time this Irish adventurer disappears, too, and your brother was known to have frequented the Irishman's company. It may be only a coincidence, but I can't help feeling that there's something in it."

Miss Benham was sitting up straight in her chair with a little alert frown.

"Have you spoken of this to my uncle?" she demanded.

"Well--no," said Ste. Marie. "Not the latter part of it--that is, not my having heard of O'Hara's disappearance. In the first place, I learned of that only three days ago, and I have not seen Captain Stewart since--I rather expected to find him here to-day; and, in the second place, I was quite sure that he would only laugh. He has laughed at me two or three times for suggesting that this Irishman might know something. Captain Stewart is--not easy to convince, you know."

"I know," she said, looking away. "He's always very certain that he's right. Well, perhaps he is right. Who knows?" She gave a little sob. "Oh!" she cried, "shall we ever have my brother back? Shall we ever see him again? It is breaking my heart, Ste. Marie, and it is killing my grandfather and, I think, my mother, too! Oh, can nothing be done?"

Ste. Marie was walking up and down the floor before her, his hands clasped behind his back. When she had finished speaking the girl saw him halt beside one of the windows, and after a moment she saw his head go up sharply and she heard him give a sudden cry. She thought he had seen something from the window which had wrung that exclamation from him, and she asked:

"What is it?"

But abruptly the man turned back into the room and came across to where she sat. It seemed to her that his face had a new look--a very strange exaltation which she had never before seen there. He said:

"Listen! I do not know if anything can be done that has not been done already, but if there is anything I shall do it, you may be sure."

"You, Ste. Marie?" she cried, in a sharp voice. "You?"

"And why not I?" he demanded.

"Oh, my friend," said she, "you could do nothing! You wouldn't know where to turn, how to set to work. Remember that a score of men who are skilled in this kind of thing have been searching for two months. What could you do that they haven't done?"

"I do not know, my Queen," said Ste. Marie, "but I shall do what I can. Who knows? Sometimes the fool who rushes in where angels have feared to tread succeeds where they have failed. Oh, let me do this!" he cried out. "Let me do it for both our sakes--for yours and for mine! It is for your sake most. I swear that! It is to set you at peace again, bring back the happiness you have lost. But it is for my sake, too, a little. It will be a test of me, a trial. If I can succeed here where so many have failed, if I bring back your brother to you--or, at least, discover what has become of him--I shall be able to come to you with less shame for my--unworthiness."

He looked down upon her with eager, burning eyes, and, after a little, the girl rose to face him. She was very white, and she stared at him silently.

"When I came to you to-day," he went on, "I knew that I had nothing to offer you but my faithful love and my life, which has been a life without value. In exchange for that I asked too much. I knew it, and you knew it, too. I know well enough what sort of man you ought to marry, and what a brilliant career you could make for yourself in the proper place--what great influence you could wield. But I asked you to give that all up, and I hadn't anything to offer in its place--nothing but love. My Queen, give me a chance now to offer you more! If I can bring back your brother or news of him, I can come to you without shame and ask you to marry me, because if I can succeed in that you will know that I can succeed in other things. You will be able to trust me. You'll know that I can climb. It shall be a sort of symbol. Let me go!"

The girl broke into a sort of sobbing laughter.

"Oh, divine madman!" she cried. "Are you all mad, you Ste. Maries, that you must be forever leading forlorn hopes? Oh, how you are, after all, a Ste. Marie! Now, at last, I know why one cannot but love you. You're the knight of old. You're chivalry come down to us. You're a ghost out of the past when men rode in armor with pure hearts seeking the Great Adventure. Oh, my friend," she said, "be wise. Give this up in time. It is a beautiful thought, and I love you for it, but it is madness--yes, yes, a sweet madness, but mad, nevertheless! What possible chance would you have of success? And think--think how failure would hurt you--and me! You must not do it, Ste. Marie."

"Failure will never hurt me, my Queen," said he, "because there are no hurts in the grave, and I shall never give over searching until I succeed or until I am dead." His face was uplifted, and there was a sort of splendid fervor upon it. It was as if it shone.

The girl stared at him dumbly. She began to realize that the knightly spirit of those gallant, long dead gentlemen was indeed descended upon the last of their house, that he burnt with the same pure fire which had long ago lighted them through quest and adventure, and she was a little afraid with an almost superstitious fear. She put out her hands upon the man's shoulders, and she moved a little closer to him, holding him.

"Oh, madness, madness!" she said, watching his face.

"Let me do it!" said Ste. Marie.

And after a silence that seemed to endure for a long time, she sighed, shaking her head, and said she:

"Oh, my friend, there is no strength in me to stop you. I think we are both a little mad, and I know that you are very mad, but I cannot say no. You seem to have come out of another century to take up this quest. How can I prevent you? But listen to one thing. If I accept this sacrifice, if I let you give your time and your strength to this almost hopeless attempt, it must be understood that it is to be within certain limits. I will not accept any indefinite thing. You may give your efforts to trying to find trace of my brother for a month if you like, or for three months, or six, or even a year, but not for more than that. If he is not found in a year's time we shall know that--we shall know that he is dead, and that--further search is useless. I cannot say how I--Oh, Ste. Marie, Ste. Marie, this is a proof of you, indeed! And I have called you idle. I have said hard things of you. It is very bitter to me to think that I have said those things."

"They were true, my Queen," said he, smiling. "They were quite, quite true. It is for me to prove now that they shall be true no longer." He took the girl's hand in his rather ceremoniously, and bent his head and kissed it. As he did so he was aware that she stirred, all at once, uneasily, and when he had raised his head he looked at her in question.

"I thought some one was coming into the room," she explained, looking beyond him. "I thought some one started to come in between the portières yonder. It must have been a servant."

"Then it is understood," said Ste. Marie. "To bring you back your happiness, and to prove myself in some way worthy of your love, I am to devote myself with all my effort and all my strength to finding your brother or some trace of him, and until I succeed I will not see your face again, my Queen."

"Oh, that!" she cried--"that, too?"

"I will not see you," said he, "until I bring you news of him, or until my year is passed and I have failed utterly. I know what risk I run. If I fail, I lose you. That is understood, too. But if I succeed--"

"Then?" she said, breathing quickly. "Then?"

"Then," said he, "I shall come to you, and I shall feel no shame in asking you to marry me, because then you will know that there is in me some little worthiness, and that in our lives together you need not be buried in obscurity--lost to the world."

"I cannot find any words to say," said she. "I am feeling just now very humble and very ashamed. It seems that I haven't known you at all. Oh yes, I am ashamed."

The girl's face, habitually so cool and composed, was flushed with a beautiful flush, and it had softened, and it seemed to quiver between a smile and a tear. With a swift movement she leaned close to him, holding by his shoulder, and for an instant her cheek was against his. She whispered to him:

"Oh, find him quickly, my dear! Find him quickly, and come back to me!"

Ste. Marie began to tremble, and she stood away from him. Once he looked up, but the flush was gone from Miss Benham's cheeks and she was pale again. She stood with her hands tight clasped over her breast. So he bowed to her very low, and turned and went out of the room and out of the house.

So quickly did he move at this last that a man who had been, for some moments, standing just outside the portières of the doorway had barely time to step aside into the shadows of the dim hall. As it was, Ste. Marie, in a more normal moment, must have seen that the man was there; but his eyes were blind, and he saw nothing. He groped for his hat and stick as if the place were a place of gloom, and, because the footman who should have been at the door was in regions unknown, he let himself out, and so went away.

Then the man who stood apart in the shadows crossed the hall to a small room which was furnished as a library, but not often used. He closed the door behind him, and went to one of the windows which gave upon the street. And he stood there for a long time, drawing absurd invisible pictures upon the glass with one finger and staring thoughtfully out into the late June afternoon.

VI

A BRAVE GENTLEMAN RECEIVES A HURT, BUT VOLUNTEERS IN A GOOD CAUSE

When Ste. Marie had gone, Miss Benham sat alone in the drawing-room for almost an hour. She had been stirred that afternoon more deeply than she thought she had ever been stirred before, and she needed time to regain that cool poise, that mental equilibrium, which was normal to her and necessary for coherent thought.

She was still in a sort of fever of bewilderment and exaltation, still all aglow with the man's own high fervor; but the second self which so often sat apart from her, and looked on with critical, mocking eyes, whispered that to-morrow, the fever past, the fervor cooled, she must see the thing in its true light--a glorious lunacy born of a moment of enthusiasm. It was finely romantic of him, this mocking second self whispered to her--picturesque beyond criticism--but, setting aside the practical folly of it, could even the mood last?

The girl rose to her feet with an angry exclamation. She found herself intolerable at such times as this.

"If there's a heaven," she cried out, "and by chance I ever go there, I suppose I shall walk sneering through the streets and saying to myself: 'Oh yes, it's pretty enough, but how absurd and unpractical!'"

She passed before one of the small, narrow mirrors which were let into the walls of the room in gilt Louis Seize frames with candles beside them, and she turned and stared at her very beautiful reflection with a resentful wonder.

"Shall I always drag along so far behind him?" she said. "Shall I never rise to him, save in the moods of an hour?"

She began suddenly to realize what the man's going away meant--that she might not see him again for weeks, months, even a year. For was it at all likely that he could succeed in what he had undertaken?

"Why did I let him go?" she cried. "Oh, fool, fool, to let him go!" But even as she said it she knew that she could not have held him back.

She began to be afraid, not for him, but of herself. He had taught her what it might be to love. For the first time love's premonitory thrill--promise of unspeakable, uncomprehended mysteries--had wrung her, and the echo of that thrill stirred in her yet; but what might not happen in his long absence? She was afraid of that critical and analyzing power of mind which she had so long trained to attack all that came to her. What might it not work with the new thing that had come? To what pitiful shreds might it not be rent while he who only could renew it was away? She looked ahead at the weeks and months to come, and she was terribly afraid.

She went out of the room and up to her grandfather's chamber and knocked there. The admirable Peters, who opened to her, said that his master had not been very well, and was just then asleep, but as they spoke together in low tones the old gentleman cried, testily, from within:

"Well? Well? Who's there? Who wants to see me? Who is it?"

Miss Benham went into the dim, shaded room, and when old David saw who it was he sank back upon his pillows with a pacified growl. He certainly looked ill, and he had grown thinner and whiter within the past month, and the lines in his waxlike face seemed to be deeper scored.

The girl went up beside the bed and stood there a moment, after she had bent over and kissed her grandfather's cheek, stroking with her hand the absurdly gorgeous mandarin's jacket--an imperial yellow one this time.

"Isn't this new?" she asked. "I seem never to have seen this one before. It's quite wonderful."

The old gentleman looked down at it with the pride of a little girl over her first party frock. He came as near simpering as a fierce person of eighty-six, with a square white beard, can come.

"Rather good--what? What?" said he. "Yes, it's new. De Vries sent it me. It is my best one. Imperial yellow. Did you notice the little Show medallions with the swastika? Young Ste. Marie was here this afternoon." He introduced the name with no pause or change of expression, as if Ste. Marie were a part of the decoration of the mandarin's jacket. "I told him he was a damned fool."

"Yes," said Miss Benham, "I know. He said you did. I suppose," she said, "that in a sort of very informal fashion I am engaged to him. Well, no, perhaps not quite that; but he seems to consider himself engaged to me, and when he has finished something very important that he has undertaken to do he is coming to ask me definitely to marry him. No, I suppose we aren't engaged yet; at least, I'm not. But it's almost the same, because I suppose I shall accept him whether he fails or succeeds in what he is doing."

"If he fails in it, whatever it may be," said old David, "he won't give you a chance to accept him; he won't come back. I know him well enough for that. He's a romantic fool, but he's a thoroughgoing fool. He plays the game." The old man looked up to his granddaughter, scowling a little. "You two are absurdly unsuited to each other," said he, "and I told Ste. Marie so. I suppose you think you're in love with him."

"Yes," said the girl, "I suppose I do."

"Idleness and all? You were rather severe on idleness at one time."

"He isn't idle any more," said she. "He has undertaken--of his own accord--to find Arthur. He has some theory about it; and he is not going to see me again until he has succeeded--or until a year is past. If he fails, I fancy he won't come back."

Old David gave a sudden hoarse exclamation, and his withered hands shook and stirred before him. Afterward he fell to half-inarticulate muttering.

"The young romantic fool!--Don Quixote--like all the rest of them--those Ste. Maries. The fool and the angels. The angels and the fool."

The girl distinguished words from time to time. For the most part, he mumbled under his breath. But when he had been silent a long time, he said, suddenly:

"It would be ridiculously like him to succeed."

The girl gave a little sigh.

"I wish I dared hope for it," said she. "I wish I dared hope for it."

She had left a book that she wanted in the drawing-room, and, when presently her grandfather fell asleep in his fitful manner, she went down after it. In crossing the hall she came upon Captain Stewart, who was dressed for the street and had his hat and stick in his hands. He did not live in his father's house, for he had a little flat in the rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, but he was in and out a good deal. He paused when he saw his niece, and smiled upon her a benignant smile which she rather disliked, because she disliked benignant people. The two really saw very little of each other, though Captain Stewart often sat for hours together with his sister, up in a little boudoir which she had furnished in the execrable taste which to her meant comfort, while that timid and colorless lady embroidered strange tea cloths with stranger flora, and prattled about the heathen, in whom she had an academic interest.

He said: "Ah, my dear! It's you?"

Indisputably it was, and there seemed to be no use of denying it, so Miss Benham said nothing, but waited for the man to go on if he had more to say.

"I dropped in," he continued, "to see my father, but they told me he was asleep, and so I didn't disturb him. I talked a little while with your mother instead."

"I have just come from him," said Miss Benham. "He dozed off again as I left. Still, if you had anything in particular to tell him, he'd be glad to be wakened, I fancy. There's no news?"

"No," said Captain Stewart, sadly--"no, nothing. I do not give up hope, but I am, I confess, a little discouraged."

"We are all that, I should think," said Miss Benham, briefly.

She gave him a little nod and turned away into the drawing-room. Her uncle's peculiar dry manner irritated her at times beyond bearing, and she felt that this was one of the times. She had never had any reason for doubting that he Was a good and kindly soul, but she disliked him because he bored her. Her mother bored her, too--the poor woman bored everybody--but the sense of filial obligation was strong enough in the girl to prevent her from acknowledging this even to herself. In regard to her uncle she had no sense of obligation whatever, except to be as civil to him as possible, and so she kept out of his way. She heard the heavy front door close, and gave a little sigh of relief.

"If he had come in here and tried to talk to me," she said, "I should have screamed."

Meanwhile Ste. Marie, a man moving in a dream, uplifted, cloud-enwrapped, made his way homeward. He walked all the long distance--that is, looking backward upon it, later, he thought he must have walked, but the half-hour was a blank to him, an indeterminate, a chaotic whirl of things and emotions.

In the little flat in the rue d'Assas he came upon Richard Hartley, who, having found the door unlocked and the master of the place absent, had sat comfortably down, with a pipe and a stack of Couriers Français, to wait. Ste. Marie burst into the doorway of the room where his friend sat at ease. Hat, gloves, and stick fell away from him in a sort of shower. He extended his arms high in the air. His face was, as it were, luminous. The Englishman regarded him morosely. He said:

"You look as if somebody had died and left you money. What the devil you looking like that for?"

"Hé!" cried Ste. Marie, in a great voice. "Hé, the world is mine! Embrace me, my infant! Sacred name of a pig, why do you sit there? Embrace me!"

He began to stride about the room, his head between his hands. Speech lofty and ridiculous burst from him in a sort of splutter of fireworks, but the Englishman sat still in his chair, and a gray, bleak look came upon him, for he began to understand. He was more or less used to these outbursts, and he bore them as patiently as he could, but though seven times out of the ten they were no more than spasms of pure joy of living, and meant, "It's a fine spring day," or "I've just seen two beautiful princesses of milliners in the street," an inner voice told him that this time it meant another thing. Quite suddenly he realized that he had been waiting for this--bracing himself against its onslaught. He had not been altogether blind through the past month. Ste. Marie seized him and dragged him from his chair.

"Dance, lump of flesh! Dance, sacred English rosbif that you are! Sing, gros polisson! Sing!" Abruptly, as usual, the mania departed from him, but not the glory; his eyes shone bright and triumphant. "Ah, my old," said he, "I am near the stars at last. My feet are on the top rungs of the ladder. Tell me that you are glad!"

The Englishman drew a long breath.

"I take it," said he, "that means that you're--that she has accepted you, eh?" He held out his hand. He was a brave and honest man. Even in pain he was incapable of jealousy. He said: "I ought to want to murder you, but I don't. I congratulate you. You're an undeserving beggar, but so were the rest of us. It was an open field, and you've won quite honestly. My best wishes!"

Then at last Ste. Marie understood, and in a flash the glory went out of his face. He cried: "Ah, mon cher ami! Pig that I am to forget. Pig! Pig! Animal!"

The other man saw that tears had sprung to his eyes, and was horribly embarrassed to the very bottom of his good British soul.

"Yes! Yes!" he said, gruffly. "Quite so, quite so! No consequence!" He dragged his hands away from Ste. Marie's grasp, stuck them in his pockets, and turned to the window beside which he had been sitting. It looked out over the sweet green peace of the Luxembourg Gardens, with their winding paths and their clumps of trees and shrubbery, their flaming flower-beds, their groups of weather-stained sculpture. A youth in laborer's corduroys and an unclean beret strolled along under the high palings; one arm was about the ample waist of a woman somewhat the youth's senior, but, as ever, love was blind. The youth carolled in a high, clear voice, "Vous êtes si jolie," a song of abundant sentiment, and the woman put up one hand and patted his cheek. So they strolled on and turned up into the rue Vavin.

Ste. Marie, across the room, looked at his friend's square back, and knew that in his silent way the man was suffering. A great sadness, the recoil from his trembling heights of bliss, came upon him and enveloped him. Was it true that one man's joy must inevitably be another's pain? He tried to imagine himself in Hartley's place, Hartley in his, and he gave a little shiver. He knew that if that bouleversement were actually to take place he would be as glad for his friend's sake as poor Hartley was now for his, but he knew also that the smile of congratulation would be a grimace of almost intolerable pain, and so he knew what Hartley's black hour must be like.

"You must forgive me," he said. "I had forgotten. I don't know why. Well, yes, happiness is a very selfish state of mind, I suppose. One thinks of nothing but one's self--and one other. I--during this past month I've been in the clouds. You must forgive me."

The Englishman turned back into the room. Ste. Marie saw that his face was as completely devoid of expression as it usually was, that his hands, when he chose and lighted a cigarette, were quite steady, and he marvelled. That would have been impossible for him under such circumstances.

"She has accepted you, I take it?" said Hartley again.

"Not quite that," said he. "Sit down and I'll tell you about it." So he told him about his hour with Miss Benham, and about what had been agreed upon between them, and about what he had undertaken to do. "Apart from wishing to do everything in this world that I can do to make her happy," he said--"and she will never be at peace again until she knows the truth about her brother--apart from that, I'm purely selfish in the thing. I've got to win her respect, as well as--the rest. I want her to respect me, and she has never quite done that. I'm an idler. So are you, but you have a perfectly good excuse. I have not. I've been an idler because it suited me, because nothing turned up, and because I have enough to eat without working for my living. I know how she has felt about all that. Well, she shall feel it no longer."

"You're taking on a big order," said the other man.

"The bigger the better," said Ste. Marie. "And I shall succeed in it or never see her again. I've sworn that."

The odd look of exaltation that Miss Benham had seen in his face, the look of knightly fervor, came there again, and Hartley saw it, and knew that the man was stirred by no transient whim. Oddly enough he thought, as had the girl earlier in the day, of those elder Ste. Maries, who had taken sword and lance and gone out into a strange world--a place of unknown terrors--afire for the Great Adventure. And this was one of their blood.

"I'm afraid you don't realize," he went on, "the difficulties you've got to face. Better men than you have failed over this thing, you know."

"A worse might nevertheless succeed," said Ste. Marie. And the other said:

"Yes. Oh yes. And there's always luck to be considered, of course. You might stumble on some trace." He threw away his cigarette and lighted another, and he smoked it down almost to the end before he spoke. At last he said: "I want to tell you something. The reason why I want to tell it comes a little later. A few weeks before you returned to Paris I asked Miss Benham to marry me."

Ste. Marie looked up with a quick sympathy. "Ah," said he. "I have sometimes thought--wondered. I have wondered if it went as far as that. Of course, I could see that you had known her well, though you seldom go there nowadays."

"Yes," said Hartley, "it went as far as that, but no farther. She--well, she didn't care for me--not in that way. So I stiffened my back and shut my mouth, and got used to the fact that what I'd hoped for was impossible. And now comes the reason for telling you what I've told. I want you to let me help you in what you're going to do--if you think you can, that is. Remember, I--cared for her, too. I'd like to do something for her. It would never have occurred to me to do this until you thought of it, but I should like very much to lend a hand--do some of the work. D'you think you could let me in?"

Ste. Marie stared at him in open astonishment, and, for an instant, something like dismay.

"Yes, yes! I know what you're thinking," said the Englishman. "You'd hoped to do it all yourself. It's your game. I know. Well, it's your game even if you let me come in. I'm just a helper. Some one to run errands. Some one, perhaps, to take counsel with now and then. Look at it on the practical side. Two heads are certainly better than one. Certainly I could be of use to you. And besides--well, I want to do something for her. I--cared, too, you see. D'you think you could take me in?"

It was the man's love that made his appeal irresistible. No one could appeal to Ste. Marie on that score in vain. It was true that he had hoped to work alone--to win or lose alone; to stand, in this matter, quite on his own feet; but he could not deny the man who had loved her and lost her. Ste. Marie thrust out his hand.

"You love her, too!" he said. "That is enough. We work together. I have a possibly foolish idea that if we can find a certain man we will learn something about Arthur Benham. I'll tell you about it."

But before he could begin the door-bell jangled.

VII

CAPTAIN STEWART MAKES A KINDLY OFFER

Ste. Marie scowled.

"A caller would come singularly malapropos just now," said he. "I've half a mind not to go to the door. I want to talk this thing over with you."

"Whoever it is," objected Hartley, "has been told by the concierge that you're at home. It may not be a caller, anyhow. It may be a parcel or something. You'd best go."

So Ste. Marie went out into the little passage, blaspheming fluently the while. The Englishman heard him open the outer door of the flat. He heard him exclaim, in great surprise:

"Ah, Captain Stewart! A great pleasure! Come in! Come in!"

And he permitted himself a little blaspheming on his own account, for the visitor, as Ste. Marie had said, came most malapropos, and, besides, he disliked Miss Benham's uncle. He heard the American say:

"I have been hoping for some weeks to give myself the pleasure of calling here, and to-day such an excellent pretext presented itself that I came straightaway."

Hartley heard him emit his mewing little laugh, and heard him say, with the elephantine archness affected by certain dry and middle-aged gentlemen:

"I come with congratulations. My niece has told me all about it. Lucky young man! Ah--"

He reached the door of the inner room and saw Richard Hartley standing by the window, and he began to apologize profusely, saying that he had had no idea that Ste. Marie was not alone. But Ste. Marie said:

"It doesn't in the least matter. I have no secrets from Hartley. Indeed, I have just been talking with him about this very thing."

But for all that he looked curiously at the elder man, and it struck him as very odd that Miss Benham should have gone straight to her uncle and told him all this. It did not seem in the least like her, especially as he knew the two were on no terms of intimacy. He decided that she must have gone up to her grandfather's room to discuss it with that old gentleman--a reasonable enough hypothesis--and that Captain Stewart must have come in during the discussion. Quite evidently he had wasted no time in setting out upon his errand of congratulation.

"Then," said Captain Stewart, "if I am to be good-naturedly forgiven for my stupidity, let me go on and say, in my capacity as a member of the family, that the news pleased me very much. I was glad to hear it."

He shook Ste. Marie's hand, looking very benignant indeed, and Ste. Marie was quite overcome with pleasure and gratitude; it seemed to him such a very kindly act in the elder man. He produced things to smoke and drink, and Captain Stewart accepted a cigarette and mixed himself a rather stiff glass of absinthe--it was between five and six o'clock.

"And now," said he, when he was at ease in the most comfortable of the low cane chairs, and the glass of opalescent liquor was properly curdled and set at hand--"now, having congratulated you and--ah, welcomed you, if I may put it so, as a probable future member of the family--I turn to the other feature of the affair."

He had an odd trick of lowering his head and gazing benevolently upon an auditor as if over the top of spectacles. It was one of his elderly ways. He beamed now upon Ste. Marie in this manner, and, after a moment, turned and beamed upon Richard Hartley, who gazed stolidly back at him without expression.

"You have determined, I hear," said he, "to join us in our search for poor Arthur. Good! Good! I welcome you there, also."

Ste. Marie stirred uneasily in his chair.

"Well," said he, "in a sense, yes. That is, I've determined to devote myself to the search, and Hartley is good enough to offer to go in with me; but I think, if you don't mind--of course, I know it's very presumptuous and doubtless idiotic of us--but, if you don't mind, I think we'll work independently. You see--well, I can't quite put it into words, but it's our idea to succeed or fail quite by our own efforts. I dare say we shall fail, but it won't be for lack of trying."

Captain Stewart looked disappointed.

"Oh, I think--" said he. "Pardon me for saying it, but I think you're rather foolish to do that." He waved an apologetic hand. "Of course, I comprehend your excellent motive. Yes, as you say, you want to succeed quite on your own. But look at the practical side! You'll have to go over all the weary weeks of useless labor we have gone over. We could save you that. We have examined and followed up, and at last given over, a hundred clews that on the surface looked quite possible of success. You'll be doing that all over again. In short, my dear friend, you will merely be following along a couple of months behind us. It seems to me a pity. I sha'n't like to see you wasting your time and efforts."

He dropped his eyes to the glass of Pernod which stood beside him, and he took it in his hand and turned it slowly and watched the light gleam in strange pearl colors upon it. He glanced up again with a little smile which the two younger men found oddly pathetic.

"I should like to see you succeed," said Captain Stewart. "I like to see youth and courage and high hope succeed." He said: "I am past the age of romance, though I am not so very old in years. Romance has passed me by, but--I love it still. It still stirs me surprisingly when I see it in other people--young people who are simple and earnest, and who--and who are in love." He laughed gently, still turning the glass in his hand. "I am afraid you will call me a sentimentalist," he said, "and an elderly sentimentalist is, as a rule, a ridiculous person. Ridiculous or not, though, I have rather set my heart on your success in this undertaking. Who knows? You may succeed where we others have failed. Youth has such a way of charging in and carrying all before it by assault--such a way of overleaping barriers that look unsurmountable to older eyes! Youth! Youth! Eh, my God," said he, "to be young again, just for a little while! To feel the blood beat strong and eager! Never to be tired! Eh, to be like one of you youngsters! You, Ste. Marie, or you, Hartley! There's so little left for people when youth is gone!"

He bent his head again, staring down upon the glass before him, and for a while there was a silence which neither of the younger men cared to break.

"Don't refuse a helping hand," said Captain Stewart, looking up once more. "Don't be over-proud. I may be able to set you upon the right path. Not that I have anything definite to work upon--I haven't, alas! But each day new clews turn up. One day we shall find the real one, and that may be one that I have turned over to you to follow out. One never knows."

Ste. Marie looked across at Richard Hartley, but that gentleman was blowing smoke-rings and to all outward appearance giving them his entire attention. He looked back to Captain Stewart, and Stewart's eyes regarded him, smiling a little wistfully, he thought. Ste. Marie scowled out of the window at the trees of the Luxembourg Gardens.

"I hardly know," said he. "Of course, I sound a braying ass in hesitating even a moment; but, in a way, you understand, I'm so anxious to do this or to fail in it quite on my own. You're--so tremendously kind about it that I don't know what to say. I must seem very ungrateful, I know; but I'm not."

"No," said the elder man, "you don't seem ungrateful at all. I understand exactly how you feel about it, and I applaud your feeling--but not your judgment. I am afraid that for the sake of a sentiment you're taking unnecessary risks of failure."

For the first time Richard Hartley spoke.

"I've an idea, you know," said he, "that it's going to be a matter chiefly of luck. One day somebody will stumble on the right trail, and that might as well be Ste. Marie or I as your trained detectives. If you don't mind my saying so, sir--I don't want to seem rude--your trained detectives do not seem to accomplish much in two months, do they?"

Captain Stewart looked thoughtfully at the younger man.

"No," he said, at last. "I am sorry to say they don't seem to have accomplished much--except to prove that there are a great many places poor Arthur has not been to and a great many people who have not seen him. After all, that is something--the elimination of ground that need not be worked over again." He set down the glass from which he had been drinking. "I cannot agree with your theory," he said. "I cannot agree that such work as this is best left to an accidental solution. Accidents are too rare. We have tried to go at it in as scientific a way as could be managed--by covering large areas of territory, by keeping the police everywhere on the alert, by watching the boy's old friends and searching his favorite haunts. Personally, I am inclined to think that he managed to slip away to America very early in the course of events, before we began to search for him, and, of course, I am having a careful watch kept there as well as here. But no trace has appeared as yet--nothing at all trustworthy. Meanwhile, I continue to hope and to work, but I grow a little discouraged. In any case, though, we shall hear of him in three months more if he is alive."

"Why three months?" asked Ste. Marie. "What do you mean by that?"

"In three months," said Captain Stewart, "Arthur will be of age, and he can demand the money left him by his father. If he is alive he will turn up for that. I have thought, from the first, that he is merely hiding somewhere until this time should be past. He--you must know that he went away very angry, after a quarrel with his grandfather? My father is not a patient man. He may have been very harsh with the boy."

"Ah, yes," said Hartley; "but no boy, however young or angry, would be foolish enough to risk an absolute break with the man who is going to leave him a large fortune. Young Benham must know that his grandfather would never forgive him for staying away all this time if he stayed away of his own accord. He must know that he'd be taking tremendous risks of being cut off altogether."

"And besides," added Ste. Marie, "it is quite possible that your father, sir, may die at any time--any hour. And he's very angry at his grandson. He may have cut him off already."

Captain Stewart's eyes sharpened suddenly, but he dropped them to the glass in his hand.

"Have you any reason for thinking that?" he asked.

"No," said Ste. Marie. "I beg your pardon. I shouldn't have said it. That is a matter which concerns your family alone. I forgot myself. The possibility occurred to me suddenly for the first time."

But the elder man looked up at him with a smile.

"Pray don't apologize," said he. "Surely we three can speak frankly together! And, frankly, I know nothing of my father's will. But I don't think he would cut poor Arthur off, though he is, of course, very angry about the boy's leaving in the manner he did. No, I am sure he wouldn't cut him off. He was fond of the lad, very fond--as we all were."

Captain Stewart glanced at his watch and rose with a little sigh.

"I must be off," said he. "I have to dine out this evening, and I must get home to change. There is a cabstand near you?" He looked out of the window. "Ah, yes! Just at the corner of the Gardens."

He turned about to Ste. Marie, and held out his hand with a smile. He said:

"You refuse to join forces with us, then? Well, I'm sorry. But, for all that, I wish you luck. Go your own way, and I hope you'll succeed. I honestly hope that, even though your success may show me up for an incompetent bungler."

He gave a little kindly laugh, and Ste. Marie tried to protest.

"Still," said the elder man, "don't throw me over altogether. If I can help you in any way, little or big, let me know. If I can give you any hints, any advice, anything at all, I want to do it. And if you happen upon what seems to be a promising clew come and talk it over with me. Oh, don't be afraid! I'll leave it to you to work out. I sha'n't spoil your game."

"Ah, now, that's very good of you," said Ste. Marie. "Only you make me seem more than ever an ungrateful fool. Thanks, I will come to you with my troubles if I may. I have a foolish idea that I want to follow out a little first, but doubtless I shall be running to you soon for information."

The elder man's eyes sharpened again with keen interest.

"An idea!" he said, quickly. "You have an idea? What--May I ask what sort of an idea?"

"Oh, it's nothing," declared Ste. Marie. "You have already laughed at it. I just want to find that man O'Hara, that's all. I've a feeling that I should learn something from him."

"Ah!" said Captain Stewart, slowly. "Yes, the man O'Hara. There's nothing in that, I'm afraid. I've made inquiries about O'Hara. It seems he left Paris six months ago, saying he was off for America. An old friend of his told me that. So you must have been mistaken when you thought you saw him in the Champs-Elysées; and he couldn't very well have had anything to do with poor Arthur. I'm afraid that idea is hardly worth following up."

"Perhaps not," said Ste. Marie. "I seem to start badly, don't I? Ah, well, I'll have to come to you all the sooner, then."

"You'll be welcome," promised Captain Stewart. "Good-bye to you! Good-day, Hartley. Come and see me, both of you. You know where I live."

He took his leave then, and Hartley, standing beside the window, watched him turn down the street, and at the corner get into one of the fiacres there and drive away.

Ste. Marie laughed aloud.

"There's the second time," said he, "that I've had him about O'Hara. If he is as careless as that about everything, I don't wonder he hasn't found Arthur Benham. O'Hara disappeared from Paris--publicly, that is--at about the time young Benham disappeared. As a matter of fact, he remains, or at least for a time remained, in the city without letting his friends know, because I made no mistake about seeing him in the Champs-Elysées. All that looks to me suspicious enough to be worth investigation. Of course," he admitted, doubtfully--"of course, I'm no detective; but that's how it looks to me."

"I don't believe Stewart is any detective, either," said Richard Hartley. "He's altogether too cocksure. That sort of man would rather die than admit he is wrong about anything. He's a good old chap, though, isn't he? I liked him to-day better than ever before. I thought he was rather pathetic when he went on about his age."

"He has a good heart," said Ste. Marie. "Very few men under the circumstances would come here and be as decent as he was. Most men would have thought I was a presumptuous ass, and would have behaved accordingly."

Ste. Marie took a turn about the room, and his face began to light up with its new excitement and exaltation.

"And to-morrow!" he cried--"to-morrow we begin! To-morrow we set out into the world and the Adventure is on foot! God send it success!"

He laughed across at the other man; but it was a laugh of eagerness, not of mirth.

"I feel," said he, "like Jason. I feel as if we were to set sail to-morrow for Colchis and the Golden Fleece."

"Y-e-s," said the other man, a little dryly--"yes, perhaps. I don't want to seem critical, but isn't your figure somewhat ill chosen?"

"'Ill chosen'?" cried Ste. Marie. "What d'you mean? Why ill chosen?"

"I was thinking of Medea," said Richard Hartley.

VIII

JASON MEETS WITH A MISADVENTURE AND DREAMS A DREAM

So on the next day these two rode forth upon their quest, and no quest was ever undertaken with a stouter courage or with a grimmer determination to succeed. To put it fancifully, they burned their tower behind them, for to one of them, at least--to him who led--there was no going back.

But, after all, they set forth under a cloud, and Ste. Marie took a heavy heart with him. On the evening before an odd and painful incident had befallen--a singularly unfortunate incident.

It chanced that neither of the two men had a dinner engagement that evening, and so, after their old habit, they dined together. There was some wrangling over where they should go, Hartley insisting upon Armenonville or the Madrid, in the Bois, Ste. Marie objecting that these would be full of tourists so late in June, and urging the claims of some quiet place in the Quarter, where they could talk instead of listening perforce to loud music. In the end, for no particular reason, they compromised on the little Spanish restaurant in the rue Helder. They went there about eight o'clock, without dressing, for it is a very quiet place which the world does not visit, and they had a sopa de yerbas, and some langostinos, which are shrimps, and a heavenly arroz, with fowl in it, and many tender, succulent strips of red pepper. They had a salad made out of a little of everything that grows green, with the true Spanish oil, which has a tang and a bouquet unappreciated by the Philistine; and then they had a strange pastry and some cheese and green almonds. And to make then glad, they drank a bottle of old red Valdepenas, and afterward a glass each of a special Manzanilla, upon which the restaurant very justly prides itself.

It was a simple dinner and a little stodgy for that time of the year, but the two men were hungry and sat at table, almost alone in the upper room, for a long time, saying how good everything was, and from time to time despatching the saturnine waiter, a Madrileno, for more peppers. When at last they came out into the narrow street, and thence to the thronged Boulevard des Italiens, it was nearly eleven o'clock. They stood for a little time in the shelter of a kiosk, looking down the boulevard to where the Place de l'Opéra opened wide and the lights of the Café de la Paix shone garish in the night. And Ste. Marie said:

"There's a street fête in Montmartre. We might drive home that way."

"An excellent idea," said the other man. "The fact that Montmartre lies in an opposite direction from home makes the plan all the better. And after that we might drive home through the Bois. That's much farther in the wrong direction. Lead on!"

So they sprang into a waiting fiacre, and were dragged up the steep, stone-paved hill to the heights, where La Bohême still reigns, though the glory of Moulin Rouge has departed and the trail of the tourist is over all. They found Montmartre very much en fête. In the Place Blanche were two of the enormous and brilliantly lighted merry-go-rounds, which only Paris knows--one furnished with stolid cattle, theatrical-looking horses, and Russian sleighs; the other with the ever-popular galloping pigs. When these dreadful machines were in rotation, mechanical organs, concealed somewhere in their bowels, emitted hideous brays and shrieks which mingled with the shrieks of the ladies mounted upon the galloping pigs, and together insulted a peaceful sky.

The square was filled with that extremely heterogeneous throng which the Parisian street fête gathers together, but it was, for the most part, a well-dressed throng, largely recruited from the boulevards, and it was quite determined to have a very good time in the cheerful, harmless Latin fashion. The two men got down from their fiacre and elbowed a way through the good-natured crowd to a place near the more popular of the merry-go-rounds. The machine was in rotation. Its garish lights shone and glittered, its hidden mechanical organ blared a German waltz tune, the huge, pink-varnished pigs galloped gravely up and down as the platform upon which they were mounted whirled round and round. A little group of American trippers, sight-seeing with a guide, stood near by, and one of the group, a pretty girl with red hair, demanded plaintively of the friend upon whose arm she hung: "Do you think momma would be shocked if we took a ride? Wouldn't I love to!"

Hartley turned, laughing, from this distressed maiden to Ste. Marie. He was wondering, with mild amusement, why anybody should wish to do such a foolish thing; but Ste. Marie's eyes were fixed upon the galloping pigs, and the eyes shone with a wistful excitement. To tell the truth, it was impossible for him to look on at any form of active amusement without thirsting to join it. A joyous and carefree lady in a blue hat, who was mounted astride upon one of the pigs, hurled a paper serpentine at him and shrieked with delight when it knocked his hat off.

"That's the second time she has hit me with one of those things," he said, groping about his feet for the hat. "Here, stop that boy with the basket!"

A vendor of the little rolls of paper ribbon was shouting his wares through the crowd. Ste. Marie filled his pockets with the things, and when the lady with the blue hat came round, on the next turn, lassoed her neatly about the neck and held the end of the ribbon till it broke. Then he caught a fat gentleman, who was holding himself on by his steed's neck, in the ear, and the red-haired American girl laughed aloud.

"When the thing stops," said Ste. Marie, "I'm going to take a ride--just one ride. I haven't ridden a pig for many years."

Hartley jeered at him, calling him an infant, but Ste. Marie bought more serpentines, and when the platform came to a stop clambered up to it and mounted the only unoccupied pig he could find. His friend still scoffed at him and called him names, but Ste. Marie tucked his long legs round the pig's neck and smiled back, and presently the machine began again to revolve.

At the end of the first revolution Hartley gave a shout of delight, for he saw that the lady with the blue hat had left her mount and was making her way along the platform toward where Ste. Marie sat hurling serpentines in the face of the world. By the next time round she had come to where he was, mounted astride behind him, and was holding herself with one very shapely arm round his neck, while with the other she rifled his pockets for ammunition. Ste. Marie grinned, and the public, loud in its acclaims, began to pelt the two with serpentines until they were hung with many-colored ribbons like a Christmas-tree. Even Richard Hartley was so far moved out of the self-consciousness with which his race is cursed as to buy a handful of the common missiles, and the lady in the blue hat returned his attention with skill and despatch.

But as the machine began to slacken its pace, and the hideous wail and blare of the concealed organ died mercifully down, Hartley saw that his friend's manner had all at once altered, that he sat leaning forward away from the enthusiastic lady with the blue hat, and that the paper serpentines had dropped from his hands. Hartley thought that the rapid motion must have made him a little giddy, but presently, before the merry-go-round had quite stopped, he saw the man leap down and hurry toward him through the crowd. Ste. Marie's face was grave and pale. He caught Hartley's arm in his hand and turned him round, crying, in a low voice:

"Come out of this as quickly as you can! No, in the other direction. I want to get away at once!"

"What's the matter?" Hartley demanded. "Lady in the blue hat too friendly? Well, if you're going to play this kind of game you might as well play it."

"Helen Benham was down there in the crowd," said Ste. Marie. "On the opposite side from you. She was with a party of people who got out of two motor-cars to look on. They were in evening things, so they had come from dinner somewhere, I suppose. She saw me."

"The devil!" said Hartley, under his breath. Then he gave a shout of laughter, demanding: "Well, what of it? You weren't committing any crime, were you? There's no harm in riding a silly pig in a silly merry-go-round. Everybody does it in these fête things." But even as he spoke he knew how extremely unfortunate the meeting was, and the laughter went out of his voice.

"I'm afraid," said Ste. Marie, "she won't see the humor of it. Good God, what a thing to happen! You know well enough what she'll think of me. At five o'clock this afternoon," he said, bitterly, "I left her with a great many fine, high-sounding words about the quest I was to give my days and nights to--for her sake. I went away from her like a--knight going into battle--consecrated. I tell you, there were tears in her eyes when I went. And now--now, at midnight--she sees me riding a galloping pig in a street fête with a girl from the boulevards sitting on the pig with me and holding me round the neck before a thousand people. What will she think of me? What but one thing can she possibly think? Oh, I know well enough! I saw her face before she turned away. And," he cried, "I can't even go to her and explain--if there's anything to explain, and I suppose there is not. I can't even go to her. I've sworn not to see her."

"Oh, I'll do that," said the other man. "I'll explain it to her, if any explanation's necessary. I think you'll find that she will laugh at it."

But Ste. Marie shook his head.

"No, she won't," said he.

And Hartley could say no more; for he knew Miss Benham, and he was very much afraid that she would not laugh.

They found a fiacre at the side of the square and drove home at once. They were almost entirely silent all the long way, for Ste. Marie was buried in gloom, and the Englishman, after trying once or twice to cheer him up, realized that he was best left to himself just then, and so held his tongue. But in the rue d'Assas, as Ste. Marie was getting down--Hartley kept the fiacre to go on to his rooms in the Avenue de l'Observatoire--he made a last attempt to lighten the man's depression. He said:

"Don't you be a silly ass about this! You're making much too much of it, you know. I'll go to her to-morrow or next day and explain, and she'll laugh---if she hasn't already done so. You know," he said, almost believing it himself, "you are paying her a dashed poor compliment in thinking she's so dull as to misunderstand a little thing of this kind. Yes, by Jove, you are!"

Ste. Marie looked up at him, and his face, in the light of the cab lamp, showed a first faint gleam of hope.

"Do you think so?" he demanded. "Do you really think that? Maybe I am. But--Oh, Lord, who would understand such an idiocy? Sacred imbecile that I am! Why was I ever born? I ask you."

He turned abruptly, and began to ring at the door, casting a brief "Good-night" over his shoulder. And after a moment Hartley gave it up and drove away.

Above, in the long, shallow front room of his flat, with the three windows overlooking the Gardens, Ste. Marie made lights, and after much rummaging unearthed a box of cigarettes of a peculiarly delectable flavor which had been sent him by a friend in the Khedivial household. He allowed himself one or two of them now and then, usually in sorrowful moments, as an especial treat; and this seemed to him to be the moment for smoking all that were left. Surely his need had never been greater. In England he had, of course, learned to smoke a pipe, but pipe-smoking always remained with him a species of accomplishment; it never brought him the deep and ruminative peace with which it enfolds the Anglo-Saxon heart. The "vieux Jacob" of old-fashioned Parisian Bohemia inspired in him unconcealed horror, of cigars he was suspicious because, he said, most of the unpleasant people he knew smoked cigars, so he soothed his soul with cigarettes, and he was usually to be found with one between his fingers.

He lighted one of the precious Egyptians, and after a first ecstatic inhalation went across to one of the long windows, which was open, and stood there with his back to the room, his face to the peaceful, fragrant night. A sudden recollection came to him of that other night a month before when he had stood on the Pont des Invalides with his eyes upon the stars, his feet upon the ladder thereunto. His heart gave a sudden exultant leap within him when he thought how far and high he had climbed, but after the leap it shivered and stood still when this evening's misadventure came before him.

Would she ever understand? He had no fear that Hartley would not do his best with her. Hartley was as honest and as faithful as ever a friend was in this world. He would do his best. But even then--It was the girl's inflexible nature that made the matter so dangerous. He knew that she was inflexible, and he took a curious pride in it. He admired it. So must have been those calm-eyed, ancient ladies for whom other Ste. Maries went out to do battle. It was well-nigh impossible to imagine them lowering their eyes to silly revelry. They could not stoop to such as that. It was beneath their high dignity. And it was beneath hers also. As for himself, he was a thing of patches. Here a patch of exalted chivalry--a noble patch--there a patch of bourgeois, childlike love of fun; here a patch of melancholic asceticism, there one of something quite the reverse. A hopeless patchwork he was. Must she not shrink from him when she knew? He could not quite imagine her understanding the wholly trivial and meaningless impulse that had prompted him to ride a galloping pig and cast paper serpentines at the assembled world.

Apart from her view of the affair, he felt no shame in it. The moment of childish gayety had been but a passing mood. It had in no way slackened his tense enthusiasm, dulled the keenness of his spirit, lowered his high flight. He knew that well enough. But he wondered if she would understand, and he could not believe it possible. The mood of exaltation in which they had parted that afternoon came to him, and then the sight of her shocked face as he had seen it in the laughing crowd in the Place Blanche.

"What must she think of me?" he cried, aloud. "What must she think of me?"

So, for an hour or more, he stood in the open window staring into the fragrant night, or tramped up and down the long room, his hands behind his back, kicking out of his way the chairs and things which impeded him, torturing himself with fears and regrets and fancies, until at last, in a calmer moment, he realized that he was working himself up into an absurd state of nerves over something which was done and could not now be helped. The man had an odd streak of fatalism in his nature--that will have come of his Southern blood--and it came to him now in his need. For the work upon which he was to enter with the morrow he had need of clear wits, not scattered ones; a calm judgment, not disordered nerves. So he took himself in hand, and it would have been amazing to any one unfamiliar with the abrupt changes of the Latin temperament to see how suddenly Ste. Marie became quiet and cool and master of himself.

"It is done," he said, with a little shrug, and if his face was for a moment bitter it quickly enough became impassive. "It is done, and it cannot be undone--unless Hartley can undo it. And now, revenons à nos moutons! Or, at least," said he, looking at his watch--and it was between one and two--"at least, to our beds!"

So he went to bed, and, so well had he recovered from his fit of excitement, he fell asleep almost at once. But for all that the jangled nerves had their revenge. He who commonly slept like the dead, without the slightest disturbance, dreamed a strange dream. It seemed to him that he stood spent and weary in a twilight place--a waste place at the foot of a high hill. At the top of the hill She sat upon a sort of throne, golden in a beam of light from heaven--serene, very beautiful, the end and crown of his weary labors. His feet were set to the ascent of the height whereon she waited, but he was withheld. From the shadows at the hill's foot a voice called to him in distress, anguish of spirit--a voice he knew; but he could not say whose voice. It besought him out of utter need, and he could not turn away from it.

Then from those shadows eyes looked upon him, very great and dark eyes, and they besought him, too; he did not know what they asked, but they called to him like the low voice, and he could not turn away.

He looked to the far height, and with all his power he strove to set his feet toward it--the goal of long labor and desire; but the eyes and the piteous voice held him motionless--for they needed him.

From this anguish he awoke trembling. And after a long time, when he was composed, he fell asleep once more, and once more he dreamed the dream.

So morning found him pallid and unrefreshed. But by daylight he knew whose eyes had besought him, and he wondered and was a little afraid.

IX

JASON GOES UPON A JOURNEY, AND RICHARD HARTLEY PLEADS FOR HIM

It may as well be admitted at the outset that neither Ste. Marie nor Richard Hartley proved themselves to be geniuses, hitherto undeveloped, in the detective science. They entered upon their self-appointed task with a fine fervor, but, as Miss Benham had suggested, with no other qualifications in particular. Ste. Marie had a theory that, when engaged in work of this nature, you went into questionable parts of the city, ate and drank cheek by jowl with questionable people--if possible, got them drunk while you remained sober (difficult feat), and sooner or later they said things which put you on the right road to your goal, or else confessed to you that they themselves had committed the particular crime in which you were interested. He argued that this was the way it happened in books, and that surely people didn't write books about things of which they were ignorant.

Hartley, on the other hand, preferred the newer, or scientific, methods. You sat at home with a pipe and a whiskey-and-water--if possible, in a long dressing-gown with a cord round its middle. You reviewed all the known facts of the case, and you did mathematics about them with Xs and Ys and many other symbols, and in the end, by a system of elimination, you proved that a certain thing must infallibly be true. The chief difficulty for him in this was, he said, that he had been at Oxford instead of at Cambridge, and so the mathematics were rather beyond him.

In practice, however, they combined the two methods, which was doubtless as well as if they hadn't, because for some time they accomplished nothing whatever, and so neither one was able to sneer at the other's stupidity.

This is not to say that they found nothing in the way of clews. They found an embarrassment of them, and for some days went about in a fever of excitement over these; but the fever cooled when clew after clew turned out to be misleading. Of course, Ste. Marie's first efforts were directed toward tracing the movements of the Irishman O'Hara, but the efforts were altogether unavailing. The man seemed to have disappeared as noiselessly and completely as had young Arthur Benham himself. He was unable even to settle with any definiteness the time of the man's departure from Paris. Some of O'Hara's old acquaintances maintained that they had seen the last of him two months before, but a shifty-eyed person in rather cheaply smart clothes came up to Ste. Marie one evening in Maxim's and said he had heard that Ste. Marie was making inquiries about M. O'Hara. Ste. Marie said he was, and that it was an affair of money; whereupon the cheaply smart individual declared that M. O'Hara had left Paris six months before to go to the United States of America, and that he had had a picture postal-card from him, some weeks since, from New York. The informant accepted an expensive cigar and a Dubonnet by way of reward, but presently departed into the night, and Ste. Marie was left in some discouragement, his theory badly damaged.

He spoke of this encounter to Richard Hartley, who came on later to join him, and Hartley, after an interval of silence and smoke, said: "That was a lie! The man lied!"

"Name of a dog, why?" demanded Ste. Marie; but the Englishman shrugged his shoulders.

"I don't know," he said. "But I believe it was a lie. The man came to you--sought you out to tell his story, didn't he? And all the others have given a different date? Well, there you are! For some reason, this man or some one behind him--O'Hara himself, probably--wants you to believe that O'Hara is in America. I dare say he's in Paris all the while."

"I hope you're right," said the other. "And I mean to make sure, too. It certainly was odd, this strange being hunting me out to tell me that. I wonder, by-the-way, how he knew I'd been making inquiries about O'Hara. I've questioned only two or three people, and then in the most casual way. Yes, it's odd."

It was about a week after this--a fruitless week, full of the alternate brightness of hope and the gloom of disappointment--that he met Captain Stewart, to whom he had been, more than once, on the point of appealing. He happened upon him quite by chance one morning in the rue Royale. Captain Stewart was coming out of a shop, a very smart-looking shop, devoted, as Ste. Marie, with some surprise and much amusement, observed, to ladies' hats, and the price of hats must have depressed him, for he looked in an ill humor, and older and more yellow than usual. But his face altered suddenly when he saw the younger man, and he stopped and shook Ste. Marie's hand with every evidence of pleasure.

"Well met! Well met!" he exclaimed. "If you are not in a hurry, come and sit down somewhere and tell me about yourself."

They picked their way across the street to the terrace of the Taverne Royale, which was almost deserted at that hour, and sat down at one of the little tables, well back from the pavement, in a corner.

"Is it fair," queried Captain Stewart--"is it fair, as a rival investigator, to ask you what success you have had?"

Ste. Marie laughed rather ruefully, and confessed that he had as yet no success at all.

"I've just come," said he, "from pricking one bubble that promised well, and Hartley is up in Montmartre destroying another, I fancy. Oh, well, we didn't expect it to be child's play."

Captain Stewart raised his little glass of dry vermouth in an old-fashioned salute and drank it.

"You," said he--"you were--ah, full of some idea of connecting this man, this Irishman O'Hara, with poor Arthur's disappearance. You've found that not so promising as you went on, I take it."

"Well, I've been unable to trace O'Hara," said Ste. Marie. "He seems to have disappeared as completely as your nephew. I suppose you have no clews to spare? I confess I'm out of them at the moment."

"Oh, I have plenty," said the elder man. "A hundred. More than I can possibly look after." He gave a little chuckling laugh. "I've been waiting for you to come to me," he said. "It was a little ungenerous, perhaps, but we all love to say, 'I told you so.' Yes, I have a great quantity of clews, and of course they all seem to be of the greatest and most exciting importance. That's a way clews have."

He took an envelope from an inner pocket of his coat, and sorted several folded papers which were in it.

"I have here," said he, "memoranda of two--chances, shall I call them?--which seem to me very good, though, as I have already said, every clew seems good. That is the maddening, the heart-breaking, part of such an investigation. I have made these brief notes from letters received, one yesterday, one the day before, from an agent of mine who has been searching the bains de mer of the north coast. This agent writes that some one very much resembling poor Arthur has been seen at Dinard and also at Deauville, and he urges me to come there or to send a man there at once to look into the matter. You will ask, of course, why this agent himself does not pursue the clew he has found. Unfortunately, he has been called to London upon some pressing family matter of his own; he is an Englishman."

"Why haven't you gone yourself?" asked Ste. Marie.

But the elder man shrugged his shoulders and smiled a tired, deprecatory smile.

"Oh, my friend," said he, "if I should attempt personally to investigate one-half of these things, I should be compelled to divide myself into twenty parts. No, I must stay here. There must be, alas! the spider at the centre of the web. I cannot go; but if you think it worth while, I will gladly turn over the memoranda of these last clews to you. They may be the true clews, they may not. At any rate, some one must look into them. Why not you and your partner--or shall I say assistant?"

"Why, thank you!" cried Ste. Marie. "A thousand thanks! Of course, I shall be--we shall be glad to try this chance. On the face of it, it sounds very reasonable. Your nephew, from what I remember of him, is much more apt to be in some place that is amusing, some place of gayety, than hiding away where it is merely dull, if he has his choice in the matter--that is, if he is free. And yet--" He turned and frowned thoughtfully at the elder man. "What I want to know," said he, "is how the boy is supporting himself all this time? You say he had no money, or very little, when he went away. How is he managing to live if your theory is correct--that he is staying away of his own accord? It costs a lot of money to live as he likes to live."

Captain Stewart nodded.

"Oh, that," said he--"that is a question I have often proposed to myself. Frankly, it's beyond me. I can only surmise that poor Arthur, who had scattered a small fortune about in foolish loans, managed, before he actually disappeared (mind you, we didn't begin to look for him until a week had gone by)--managed to collect some of this money, and so went away with something in pocket. That, of course, is only a guess."

"It is possible," said Ste. Marie, doubtfully, "but--I don't know. It is not very easy to raise money from the sort of people I imagine your nephew to have lent it to. They borrow, but they don't repay." He glanced up with a half-laughing, half-defiant air. "I can't," said he, "rid myself of a belief that the boy is here in Paris, and that he is not free to come or go. It's only a feeling, but it is very strong in me. Of course, I shall follow out these clews you've been so kind as to give me. I shall go to Dinard and Deauville, and Hartley, I imagine, will go with me, but I haven't great confidence in them."

Captain Stewart regarded him reflectively for a time, and in the end he smiled.

"If you will pardon my saying it," he said, "your attitude is just a little womanlike. You put away reason for something vaguely intuitive. I always distrust intuition myself."

Ste. Marie frowned a little and looked uncomfortable. He did not relish being called womanlike--few men do; but he was bound to admit that the elder man's criticism was more or less just.

"Moreover," pursued Captain Stewart, "you altogether ignore the point of motive--as I may have suggested to you before. There could be no possible motive, so far as I am aware, for kidnapping or detaining, or in any way harming, my nephew except the desire for money; but, as you know, he had no large sum of money with him, and no demand has been made upon us since his disappearance. I'm afraid you can't get round that."

"No," said Ste. Marie, "I'm afraid I can't. Indeed, leaving that aside--and it can't be left aside--I still have almost nothing with which to prop up my theory. I told you it was only a feeling."

He took up the memoranda which Captain Stewart had laid upon the marble-topped table between them, and read the notes through.

"Please," said he, "don't think I am ungrateful for this chance. I am not. I shall do my best with it, and I hope it may turn out to be important." He gave a little wry smile. "I have all sorts of reasons," he said, "for wishing to succeed as soon as possible. You may be sure that there won't be any delays on my part. And now I must be going on. I am to meet Hartley for lunch on the other side of the river, and, if we can manage it, I should like to start north this afternoon or evening."

"Good!" said Captain Stewart, smiling. "Good! That is what I call true promptness. You lose no time at all. Go to Dinard and Deauville, by all means, and look into this thing thoroughly. Don't be discouraged if you meet with ill success at first. Take Mr. Hartley with you, and do your best."

He paid for the two glasses of apéritif, and Ste. Marie could not help observing that he left on the table a very small tip. The waiter cursed him audibly as the two walked away.

"If you have returned by a week from to-morrow," he said, as they shook hands, "I should like to have you keep that evening--Thursday--for me. I am having a very informal little party in my rooms. There will be two or three of the opera people there, and they will sing for us, and the others will be amusing enough. All young--all young. I like young people about me." He gave his odd little mewing chuckle. "And the ladies must be beautiful as well as young. Come if you are here! I'll drop a line to Mr. Hartley also."

He shook Ste. Marie's hand, and went away down the street toward the rue du Faubourg St. Honoré where he lived.

Ste. Marie met Hartley as he expected to do, at lunch, and they talked over the possibilities of the Dinard and Deauville expedition. In the end they decided that Ste. Marie should go alone, but that he was to telegraph, later on, if the clew looked promising. Hartley had two or three investigations on foot in Paris, and stayed on to complete these. Also he wished, as soon as possible, to see Helen Benham and explain Ste. Marie's ride on the galloping pigs. Ten days had elapsed since that evening, but Miss Benham had gone into the country the next day to make a visit at the De Saulnes' château on the Oise.

So Ste. Marie packed a portmanteau with clothes and things, and departed by a mid-afternoon train to Dinard, and toward five Richard Hartley walked down to the rue de I'Université. He thought it just possible that Miss Benham might by now have returned to town, but if not he meant to have half an hour's chat with old David Stewart, whom he had not seen for some weeks.

At the door he learned that mademoiselle was that very day returned and was at home. So he went in to the drawing-room, reserving his visit to old David until later. He found the room divided into two camps. At one side Mrs. Benham conversed in melancholic monotones with two elderly French ladies who were clad in depressing black of a dowdiness surpassed only in English provincial towns. It was as if the three mourned together over the remains of some dear one who lay dead among them. Hartley bowed low, with an uncontrollable shiver, and turned to the tea-table, where Miss Benham sat in the seat of authority, flanked by a young American lady whom he had met before, and by Baron de Vries, whom he had not seen since the evening of the De Saulnes' dinner-party.

Miss Benham greeted him with evident pleasure, and to his great delight remembered just how he liked his tea--three pieces of sugar and no milk. It always flatters a man when his little tastes of this sort are remembered. The four fell at once into conversation together, and the young American lady asked Hartley why Ste. Marie was not with him.

"I thought you two always went about together," she said--"were never seen apart and all that--a sort of modern Damon and Phidias."

Hartley caught Baron de Vries' eye, and looked away again hastily.

"My--ah, Phidias," said he, resisting an irritable desire to correct the lady, "got mislaid to-day. It sha'n't happen again, I promise you. He's a very busy person just now, though. He hasn't time for social dissipation. I'm the butterfly of the pair."

The lady gave a sudden laugh.

"He was busy enough the last time I saw him," she said, crinkling her eyelids. She turned to Miss Benham. "Do you remember that evening we were going home from the Madrid and motored round by Montmartre to see the fête?"

"Yes," said Miss Benham, unsmiling, "I remember."

"Your friend Ste. Marie," said the American lady to Hartley, "was distinctly the lion of the fête--at the moment we arrived, anyhow. He was riding a galloping pig and throwing those paper streamer things--what do you call them?--with both hands, and a genial lady in a blue hat was riding the same pig and helping him out. It was just like the Vie de Bohème and the other books. I found it charming."

Baron de Vries emitted an amused chuckle.

"That was very like Ste. Marie," he said. "Ste. Marie is a very exceptional young man. He can be an angel one moment, a child playing with toys the next, and--well, a rather commonplace social favorite the third. It all comes of being romantic--imaginative. Ste. Marie--I know nothing about this evening of which you speak, but Ste. Marie is quite capable of stopping on his way to a funeral to ride a galloping pig--or on his way to his own wedding. And the pleasant part of it is," said Baron de Vries, "that the lad would turn up at either of these two ceremonies not a bit the worse, outside or in, for his ride."

"Ah, now, that's an oddly close shot," said Hartley. He paused a moment, looking toward Miss Benham, and said: "I beg pardon! Were you going to speak?"

"No," said Miss Benham, moving the things about on the tea-table before her, and looking down at them. "No, not at all!"

"You came oddly close to the truth," the man went on, turning back to Baron de Vries.

He was speaking for Helen Benham's ears, and he knew she would understand that, but he did not wish to seem to be watching her.

"I was with Ste. Marie on that evening," he said. "No, I wasn't riding a pig, but I was standing down in the crowd throwing serpentines at the people who were. And I happen to know that he--that Ste. Marie was on that day, that evening, more deeply concerned about something, more absolutely wrapped up in it, devoted to it, than I have ever known him to be about anything since I first knew him. The galloping pig was an incident that made, except for the moment, no impression whatever upon him." Hartley nodded his head. "Yes," said he, "Ste. Marie can be an angel one moment and a child playing with toys the next. When he sees toys he always plays with them, and he plays hard, but when he drops them they go completely out of his mind."

The American lady laughed.

"Gracious me!" she cried. "You two are emphatic enough about him, aren't you?"

"We know him," said Baron de Vries.

Hartley rose to replace his empty cup on the tea-table. Miss Benham did not meet his eyes, and as he moved away again she spoke to her friend about something they were going to do on the next day, so Hartley went across to where Baron de Vries sat at a little distance, and took a place beside him on the chaise lounge. The Belgian greeted him with raised eyebrows and the little, half-sad, half-humorous smile which was characteristic of him in his gentler moments.

"You were defending our friend with a purpose," he said, in a low voice. "Good! I am afraid he needs it--here."

The younger man hesitated a moment. Then he said:

"I came on purpose to do that. Ste. Marie knows that she saw him on that confounded pig. He was half wild with distress over it, because--well, the meeting was singularly unfortunate just then. I can't explain--"

"You needn't explain," said the Belgian, gravely. "I know. Helen told me some days ago, though she did not mention this encounter. Yes, defend him with all your power, if you will. Stay after we others have gone and--have it out with her. The Phidias lady (I must remember that mot, by-the-way) is preparing to take her leave now, and I will follow her at once. She shall believe that I am enamoured, that I sigh for her. Eh!" said he, shaking his head--and the lines in the kindly old face seemed to deepen, but in a sort of grave tenderness--"eh, so love has come to the dear lad at last! Ah, of course, the hundred other affairs! Yes, yes. But they were light. No seriousness in them. The ladies may have loved. He didn't--very much. This time, I'm afraid--"

Baron de Vries paused as if he did not mean to finish his sentence, and Hartley said:

"You say 'afraid'! Why afraid?"

The Belgian looked up at him reflectively.

"Did I say 'afraid'?" he asked. "Well, perhaps it was the word I wanted. I wonder if these two are fitted for each other. I am fond of them both. I think you know that, but--she's not very flexible, this child. And she hasn't much humor. I love her, but I know those things are true. I wonder if one ought to marry Ste. Marie without flexibility and without humor."

"If they love each other," said Richard Hartley, "I expect the other things don't count. Do they?"

Baron de Vries rose to his feet, for he saw that the Phidias lady was going.

"Perhaps not," said he; "I hope not. In any case, do your best for him with Helen. Make her comprehend if you can. I am afraid she is unhappy over the affair."

He made his adieus, and went away with the American lady, to that young person's obvious excitement. And after a moment the three ladies across the room departed also, Mrs. Benham explaining that she was taking her two friends up to her own sitting-room, to show them something vaguely related to the heathen. So Hartley was left alone with Helen Benham.

It was not his way to beat about the bush, and he gave battle at once. He said, standing, to say it more easily:

"You know why I came here to-day? It was the first chance I've had since that--unfortunate evening. I came on Ste. Marie's account."

Miss Benham said a weak "Oh!" And because she was nervous and overwrought, and because the thing meant so much to her, she said, cheaply: "He owes me no apologies. He has a perfect right to act as he pleases, you know."

The Englishman frowned across at her. "I didn't come to make apologies," said he. "I came to explain. Well, I have explained--Baron de Vries and I together. That's just how it happened. And that's just how Ste. Marie takes things. The point is that you've got to understand it. I've got to make you."

The girl smiled up at him dolefully. "You look," she said, "as if you were going to beat me if necessary. You look very warlike."

"I feel warlike," the man said, nodding. He said: "I'm fighting for a friend to whom you are doing, in your mind, an injustice. I know him better than you do, and I tell you you're doing him a grave injustice. You're failing altogether to understand him."

"I wonder," the girl said, looking very thoughtfully down at the table before her.

"I know," said he.

Quite suddenly she gave a little overwrought cry, and she put up her hands over her face. "Oh, Richard!" she said, "that day when he was here! He left me--oh, I cannot tell you at what a height he left me! It was something new and beautiful. He swept me to the clouds with him. And I might--perhaps I might have lived on there. Who knows? But then that hideous evening! Ah, it was too sickening: the fall back to common earth again!"

"I know," said the man, gently--"I know. And he knew, too. Directly he'd seen you he knew how you would feel about it. I'm not pretending that it was of no consequence. It was unfortunate, of course. But the point is, it did not mean in him any slackening, any stooping, any letting go. It was a moment's incident. We went to the wretched place by accident after dinner. Ste. Marie saw those childish lunatics at play, and for about two minutes he played with them. The lady in the blue hat made it appear a little more extreme, and that's all."

Miss Benham rose to her feet and moved restlessly back and forth. "Oh, Richard," she said, "the golden spell is broken--the enchantment he laid upon me that day. I'm not like him, you know. Oh, I wish I were! I wish I were! I can't change from hour to hour. I can't rise to the clouds again after my fall to earth. It has all--become something different. Don't misunderstand me!" she cried. "I don't mean that I've ceased to care for him. No, far from that! But I was in such an exalted heaven, and now I'm not there any more. Perhaps he can lift me to it again. Oh yes, I'm sure he can, when I see him once more; but I wanted to go on living there so happily while he was away! Do you understand at all?"

"I think I do," the man said, but he looked at her very curiously and a little sadly, for it was the first time he had ever seen her swept from her superb poise by any emotion, and he hardly recognized her. It was very bitter to him to realize that he could never have stirred her to this--never, under any conceivable circumstances.

The girl came to him where he stood, and touched his arm with her hand. "He is waiting to hear how I feel about it all, isn't he?" she said. "He is waiting to know that I understand. Will you tell him a little lie for me, Richard? No, you needn't tell a lie. I will tell it. Tell him that I said I understood perfectly. Tell him that I was shocked for a moment, but that afterward I understood and thought no more about it. Will you tell him I said that? It won't be a lie from you, because I did say it. Oh, I will not grieve him or hamper him now while he is working in my cause! I'll tell him a lie rather than have him grieve."

"Need it be a lie?" said Richard Hartley. "Can't you truly believe what you've said?"

She shook her head slowly.

"I'll try," said she, "but--my golden spell is broken and I can't mend it alone. I'm sorry."

He turned with a little sigh to leave her, but Miss Benham followed him toward the door of the drawing-room.

"You're a good friend, Richard," she said, when she had come near--"you're a good friend to him."

"He deserves good friends," said the young man, stoutly. "And besides," said he, "we're brothers in arms nowadays. We've enlisted together to fight for the same cause." The girl fell back with a little cry.

"Do you mean," she said, after a moment--"do you mean that you are working with him--to find Arthur?"

Hartley nodded.

"But--" said she, stammering. "But, Richard--"

The man checked her.

"Oh, I know what I'm doing," said he. "My eyes are open. I know that I'm not--well, in the running. I work for no reward except a desire to help you and Ste. Marie. That's all. It pleases me to be useful."

He went away with that, not waiting for an answer, and the girl stood where he had left her, staring after him.

X

CAPTAIN STEWART ENTERTAINS

Ste. Marie returned, after three days, from Dinard in a depressed and somewhat puzzled frame of mind. He had found no trace whatever of Arthur Benham, either at Dinard or at Deauville, and, what was more, he was unable to discover that any one even remotely resembling that youth had been seen at either place. The matter of identification, it seemed to him, should be a rather simple one. In the first place, the boy's appearance was not at all French, nor, for that matter, English; it was very American. Also, he spoke French--so Ste. Marie had been told--very badly, having for the language that scornful contempt peculiar to Anglo-Saxons of a certain type. His speech, it seemed, was, like his appearance, ultra-American--full of strange idioms and oddly pronounced. In short, such a youth would be rather sure to be remembered by any hotel management and staff with which he might have come in contact.

At first Ste. Marie pursued his investigations quietly and, as it were, casually; but after his initial failure he went to the managements of the various hotels and lodging-houses, and to the cafés and bathing establishments, and told them, with all frankness, a part of the truth--that he was searching for a young man whose disappearance had caused great distress to his family. He was not long in discovering that no such young man could have been either in Dinard or Deauville.

The thing which puzzled him was that, apart from finding no trace of the missing boy, he also found no trace of Captain Stewart's agent--the man who had been first on the ground. No one seemed able to recollect that such a person had been making inquiries, and Ste. Marie began to suspect that his friend was being imposed upon. He determined to warn Stewart that his agents were earning their fees too easily.

So he returned to Paris more than a little dejected, and sore over this waste of time and effort. He arrived by a noon train, and drove across the city in a fiacre to the rue d'Assas. But as he was in the midst of unpacking his portmanteau--for he kept no servant; a woman came in once a day to "do" the rooms--the door-bell rang. It was Baron de Vries, and Ste. Marie admitted him with an exclamation of surprise and pleasure.

"You passed me in the street just now," explained the Belgian, "and as I was a few minutes early for a lunch engagement I followed you up." He pointed with his stick at the open bag. "Ah, you have been on a journey! Detective work?"

Ste. Marie pushed his guest into a chair, gave him cigarettes, and told him about the fruitless expedition to Dinard. He spoke, also, of his belief that Captain Stewart's agent had never really found a clew at all; and at that Baron de Vries nodded his gray head and said, "Ah!" in a tone of some significance. Afterward he smoked a little while in silence, but presently he said, as if with some hesitation: "May I be permitted to offer a word of advice?"

"But surely!" cried Ste. Marie, kicking away the half-empty portmanteau. "Why not?"

"Do whatever you are going to do in this matter according to your own judgment," said the elder man, "or according to Mr. Hartley's and your combined judgments. Make your investigations without reference to our friend Captain Stewart." He halted there as if that were all he had meant to say, but when he saw Ste. Marie's raised eyebrows he frowned and went on, slowly, as if picking his words with some care. "I should be sorry," he said, "to have Captain Stewart at the head of any investigation of this nature in which I was deeply interested--just now, at any rate. I am afraid--it is difficult to say; I do not wish to say too much--I am afraid he is not quite the man for the position."

Ste. Marie nodded his head with great emphasis. "Ah," he cried, "that's just what I have felt, you know, all along! And it's what Hartley felt, too, I'm sure. No, Stewart is not the sort for a detective. He's too cocksure. He won't admit that he might possibly be wrong now and then. He's too--"

"He is too much occupied with other matters," said Baron de Vries.

Ste. Marie sat down on the edge of a chair. "Other matters?" he demanded. "That sounds mysterious. What other matters?"

"Oh, there is nothing very mysterious about it," said the elder man. He frowned down at his cigarette, and brushed some fallen ash neatly from his knees. "Captain Stewart," said he, "is badly worried, and has been for the past year or so--badly worried over money matters and other things. He has lost enormous sums at play, as I happen to know, and he has lost still more enormous sums at Auteuil and at Longchamps. Also, the ladies are not without their demands."

Ste. Marie gave a shout of laughter. "Comment donc!" he cried. "Ce vieillard?"

"Ah, well," deprecated the other man. "Vieillard is putting it rather high. He can't be more than fifty, I should think. To be sure, he looks older; but then, in his day, he lived a great deal in a short time. Do you happen to remember Olga Nilssen?"

"I do," said Ste. Marie. "I remember her very well, indeed. I was a sort of go-between in settling up that affair with Morrison. Morrison's people asked me to do what I could. Yes, I remember her well, and with some pleasure. I felt sorry for her, you know. People didn't quite know the truth of that affair. Morrison behaved very badly to her."

"Yes," said Baron de Vries, "and Captain Stewart has behaved very badly to her also. She is furious with rage or jealousy--or both. She goes about, I am told, threatening to kill him, and it would be rather like her to do it one day. Well, I have dragged in all this scandal by way of showing you that Stewart has his hands full of his own affairs just now, and so cannot give the attention he ought to give to hunting out his nephew. As you suggest, his agents may be deceiving him. I don't know. I suppose they could do it easily enough. If I were you I should set to work quite independently of him."

"Yes," said Ste. Marie, in an absent tone. "Oh yes, I shall do that, you may be sure." He gave a sudden smile. "He's a queer type, this Captain Stewart. He begins to interest me very much. I had never suspected this side of him, though I remember now that I once saw him coming out of a milliner's shop. He looks rather an ascetic--rather donnish, don't you think? I remember that he talked to me one day quite pathetically about feeling his age and about liking young people round him. He's an odd character. Fancy him mixed up in an affair with Olga Nilssen! Or, rather, fancy her involved in an affair with him! What can she have seen in him? She's not mercenary, you know--at least, she used not to be."

"Ah! there," said Baron de Vries, "you enter upon a terra incognita. No one can say what a woman sees in this man or in that. It's beyond our ken."

He rose to take his leave, and Ste. Marie went with him to the door.

"I've been asked to a sort of party at Stewart's rooms this week," Ste. Marie said. "I don't know whether I shall go or not. Probably not. I suppose I shouldn't find Olga Nilssen there?"

"Well, no," said the Belgian, laughing. "No, I hardly think so. Good-bye! Think over what I've told you. Good-bye!"

He went away down the stair, and Ste. Marie returned to his unpacking.

Nothing more of consequence occurred in the next few days. Hartley had unearthed a somewhat shabby adventurer who swore to having seen the Irishman O'Hara in Paris within a month, but it was by no means certain that this being did not merely affirm what he believed to be desired of him, and in any case the information was of no especial value, since it was O'Hara's present whereabouts that was the point at issue. So it came to Thursday evening. Ste. Marie received a note from Captain Stewart during the day, reminding him that he was to come to the rue du Faubourg St. Honoré that evening, and asking him to come early, at ten or thereabouts, so that the two could have a comfortable chat before any one else turned up. Ste. Marie had about decided not to go at all, but the courtesy of this special invitation from Miss Benham's uncle made it rather impossible for him to stay away. He tried to persuade Hartley to follow him on later in the evening, but that gentleman flatly refused and went away to dine with some English friends at Armenonville.

So Ste. Marie, in a vile temper, dined quite alone at Lavenue's, beside the Gare Montparnasse, and toward ten o'clock drove across the river to the rue du Faubourg. Captain Stewart's flat was up five stories, at the top of the building in which it was located, and so, well above the noises of the street. Ste. Marie went up in the automatic lift, and at the door above his host met him in person, saying that the one servant he kept was busy making preparations in the kitchen beyond. They entered a large room, long but comparatively shallow, in shape not unlike the sitting-room in the rue d'Assas, but very much bigger, and Ste. Marie uttered an exclamation of surprise and pleasure, for he had never before seen an interior anything like this. The room was decorated and furnished entirely in Chinese and Japanese articles of great age and remarkable beauty. Ste. Marie knew little of the hieratic art of these two countries, but he fancied that the place must be an endless delight to the expert.

The general tone of the room was gold, dulled and softened by great age until it had ceased to glitter, and relieved by the dusty Chinese blue and by old red faded to rose and by warm ivory tints. The great expanse of the walls was covered by a brownish-yellow cloth, coarse like burlap, and against it, round the room, hung sixteen large panels representing the sixteen Rakan. They were early copies--fifteenth century, Captain Stewart said--of those famous originals by the Chinese Sung master Ririomin, which have been for six hundred years or more the treasures of Japan. They were mounted upon Japanese brocade of blue and dull gold, framed in keyaki wood, and out of their brown, time-stained shadows the great Rakan scowled or grinned or placidly gazed, grotesquely graceful masterpieces of a perished art.

At the far end of the room, under a gilded canopy of intricate wood-carving, stood upon his pedestal of many-petalled lotus a great statue of Amida Buddha in the yogi attitude of contemplation, and at intervals against the other walls other smaller images stood or sat: Buddha, in many incarnations; Kwannon, goddess of mercy; Jizo Bosatzu Hotei, pot-bellied, god of contentment; Jingo-Kano, god of war. In the centre of the place was a Buddhist temple table, and priests' chairs, lacquered and inlaid, stood about the room. The floor was covered with Chinese rugs, dull yellow with blue flowers, and over a doorway which led into another room was fixed a huge rama of Chinese pierced carving, gilded, in which there were trees and rocks and little grouped figures of the hundred immortals.

It, was, indeed an extraordinary room. Ste. Marie looked about its mellow glow with a half-comprehending wonder, and he looked at the man beside him curiously, for here was another side to this many-sided character. Captain Stewart smiled.

"You like my museum?" he asked. "Few people care much for it except, of course, those who go in for the Oriental arts. Most of my friends think it bizarre--too grotesque and unusual. I have tried to satisfy them by including those comfortable low divan-couches (they refuse altogether to sit in the priests' chairs), but still they are unhappy."

He called his servant, who came to take Ste. Marie's hat and coat and returned with smoking things.

"It seems entirely wonderful to me," said the younger man. "I'm not an expert at all--I don't know who the gentlemen in those sixteen panels are, for example--but it is very beautiful. I have never seen anything like it at all." He gave a little laugh. "Will it sound very impertinent in me, I wonder, if I express surprise--not surprise at finding this magnificent room, but at discovering that this sort of thing is a taste and, very evidently, a serious study of yours? You--I remember your saying once with some feeling that it was youth and beauty and--well, freshness that you liked best to be surrounded by. This," said Ste. Marie, waving an inclusive hand, "was young so many centuries ago! It fairly breathes antiquity and death."

"Yes," said Captain Stewart, thoughtfully. "Yes, that is quite true."

The two had seated themselves upon one of the broad, low benches which had been built into the place to satisfy the Philistine.

"I find it hard to explain," he said, "because both things are passions of mine. Youth--I could not exist without it. Since I have it no longer in my own body, I wish to see it about me. It gives me life. It keeps my heart beating. I must have it near. And then this--antiquity and death, beautiful things made by hands dead centuries ago in an alien country! I love this, too. I didn't speak too strongly; it is a sort of passion with me--something quite beyond the collector's mania--quite beyond that. Sometimes, do you know, I stay at home in the evening, and I sit here quite alone, with the lights half on, and for hours together I smoke and watch these things--the quiet, sure, patient smile of that Buddha, for example. Think how long he has been smiling like that, and waiting! Waiting for what? There is something mysterious beyond all words in that smile of his, that fixed, crudely carved wooden smile--no, I'll be hanged if it's crude! It is beyond our modern art. The dead men carved better than we do. We couldn't manage that with such simple means. We can only reproduce what is before us. We can't carve questions--mysteries--everlasting riddles."

Through the pale-blue, wreathing smoke of his cigarette Captain Stewart gazed down the room to where eternal Buddha stood and smiled eternally. And from there the man's eyes moved with slow enjoyment along the opposite wall over those who sat or stood there, over the panels of the ancient Rakan, over carved lotus, and gilt contorted dragon forever in pursuit of the holy pearl. He drew a short breath which seemed to bespeak extreme contentment, the keenest height of pleasure, and he stirred a little where he sat and settled himself among the cushions. Ste. Marie watched him, and the expression of the man's face began to be oddly revolting. It was the face of a voluptuary in the presence of his desire. He was uncomfortable, and wished to say something to break the silence, but, as often occurs at such a time, he could think of nothing to say. So there was a brief silence between them. But presently Captain Stewart roused himself with an obvious effort.

"Here, this won't do!" said he, in a tone of whimsical apology. "This won't do, you know. I'm floating off on my hobby (and there's a mixed metaphor that would do credit to your own Milesian blood!). I'm boring you to extinction, and I don't want to do that, for I'm anxious that you should come here again--and often. I should like to have you form the habit. What was it I had in mind to ask you about? Ah, yes! The journey to Dinard and Deauville. I am afraid it turned out to be fruitless or you would have let me know."

"Entirely fruitless," said Ste. Marie.

He went on to tell the elder man of his investigation, and of his certainty that no one resembling Arthur Benham had been at either of the two places.

"It's no affair of mine, to be sure," he said, "but I rather suspect that your agent was deceiving you--pretending to have accomplished something by way of making you think he was busy."

Ste. Marie was so sure the other would immediately disclaim this that he waited for the word, and gave a little smothered laugh when Captain Stewart said, promptly:

"Oh no! No! That is impossible. I have every confidence in that man. He is one of my best. No, you are mistaken there. I am more disappointed than you could possibly be over the failure of your efforts, but I am quite sure my man thought he had something worth working upon. By-the-way, I have received another rather curious communication--from Ostend this time. I will show you the letter, and you may try your luck there if you would care to." He felt in his pockets and then rose. "I've left the thing in another coat," said he; "if you will allow me, I'll fetch it." But before he had turned away the door-bell rang and he paused. "Ah, well," he said, "another time. Here are some of my guests. They have come earlier than I had expected."

The new arrivals were three very perfectly dressed ladies, one of them an operatic light, who chanced not to be singing that evening and whom Ste. Marie had met before. The two others were rather difficult of classification, but probably, he thought, ornaments of that mysterious border-land between the two worlds which seems to give shelter to so many people against whose characters nothing definite is known, but whose antecedents and connections are not made topics of conversation. The three ladies seemed to be on very friendly terms with Captain Stewart, and greeted him with much noisy delight. One of the unclassified two, when her host, with a glance toward Ste. Marie, addressed her formally, seemed inordinately amused, and laughed for a long time.

Within the next hour ten or a dozen other guests had arrived, and they all seemed to know one another very well, and proceeded to make themselves quite at home. Ste. Marie regarded them with a reflective and not over-enthusiastic eye, and he wondered a good deal why he had been asked here to meet them. He was as far from a prig or a snob as any man could very well be, and he often went to very Bohemian parties which were given by his painter or musician friends, but these people seemed to him quite different. The men, with the exception of two eminent opera-singers, who quite obviously had been asked because of their voices, were the sort of men who abound at such places as Ostend and Monte Carlo, and Baden-Baden in the race week. That is not to say that they were ordinary racing touts or the cheaper kind of adventurers (there was a count among them, and a marquis who had recently been divorced by his American wife), but adventurers of a sort they undoubtedly were. There was not one of them, so far as Ste. Marie was aware, who was received anywhere in good society, and he resented very much being compelled to meet them.

Naturally enough, he felt much less concern on the score of the ladies. It is an undoubted and well-nigh universal truth that men who would refuse outright to meet certain classes of their own sex show no reluctance whatever over meeting the women of a corresponding circle--that is, if the women are attractive. It is a depressing fact and inclines one to sighs and head-shakes, and some moral indignation, until the reverse truth is brought to light--namely, that women have identically the same point of view; that, while they cast looks of loathing and horror upon certain of their sisters, they will meet with pleasure any presentable man whatever his crimes or vices.

Ste. Marie was very much puzzled over all this. It seemed to him so unnecessary that a man who really had some footing in the newer society of Paris should choose to surround himself with people of this type; but as he looked on and wondered he became aware of a curious and, in the light of a past conversation, significant fact: all of the people in the room were young; all of them in their varying fashions and degrees very attractive to look upon; all full to overflowing of life and spirits and the determination to have a good time. He saw Captain Stewart moving among them, playing very gracefully his rôle of host, and the man seemed to have dropped twenty years from his shoulders. A miracle of rejuvenation seemed to have come upon him: his eyes were bright and eager, the color was high in his cheeks, and the dry, pedantic tone had gone from his voice. Ste. Marie watched him, and at last he thought he understood. It was half revolting, half pathetic, he thought, but it certainly was interesting to see.

Duval, the great basso of the Opéra, accompanied at the piano by one of the unclassified ladies, was just finishing Mephistopheles' drinking song out of Faust when the door-bell rang.

XI

A GOLDEN LADY ENTERS--THE EYES AGAIN

The music of voice and piano was very loud just then, so that the little, soft, whirring sound of the electric bell reached only one or two pairs of ears in the big room. It did not reach the host certainly, and neither he nor most of the others observed the servant make his way among the groups of seated or standing people and go to the outer door, which opened upon a tiny hallway. The song came to an end, and everybody was cheering and applauding and crying "Bravo!" or "Bis!" or one of the other things that people shout at such times, when, as if in unexpected answer to the outburst, a lady appeared between the yellow portières and came forward a little way into the room. She was a tall lady of an extraordinary and immediately noticeable grace of movement--a lady with rather fair hair; but her eyebrows and eyelashes had been stained darker than it was their nature to be. She had the classic Greek type of face--and figure, too--all but the eyes, which were long and narrow--narrow, perhaps, from a habit of going half closed; and when they were a little more than half closed they made a straight black line that turned up very slightly at the outer end with an Oriental effect which went oddly in that classic face. There is a popular piece of sculpture now in the Luxembourg Gallery for which this lady "sat" as model to a great artist. Sculptors from all over the world go there to dream over its perfect line and contour, and little schoolgirls pretend not to see it, and middle-aged maiden tourists, with red Baedekers in their hands, regard it furtively and pass on, and after a while come back to look again.

The lady was dressed in some very close-clinging material which was not cloth of gold, but something very like it, only much duller--something which gleamed when she stirred, but did not glitter--and over her splendid shoulders was hung an Oriental scarf heavily worked with metallic gold. She made an amazing and dramatic picture in that golden room. It was as if she had known just what her surroundings would be and had dressed expressly for them.

The applause ceased as suddenly as if it had been trained to break off at a signal, and the lady came forward a little way, smiling a quiet, assured smile. At each step her knee threw out the golden stuff of her gown an inch or two, and it flashed suddenly--a dull, subdued flash in the overhead light--and died and flashed again. A few of the people in the room knew who the lady was, and they looked at one another with raised eyebrows and startled faces; but the others stared at her with an eager admiration, thinking that they had seldom seen anything so beautiful or so effective. Ste. Marie sat forward on the edge of his chair. His eyes sparkled, and he gave a little quick sigh of pleasurable excitement. This was drama, and very good drama, too, and he suspected that it might at any moment turn into a tragedy.

He saw Captain Stewart, who had been among a group of people half-way across the room, turn his head to look when the cries and the applause ceased so suddenly, and he saw the man's face stiffen by swift degrees, all the joyous, buoyant life gone out of it, until it was yellow and rigid like a dead man's face; and Ste. Marie, out of his knowledge of the relations between these two people, nodded, en connaisseur, for he knew that the man was very badly frightened.

So the host of the evening hung back, staring for what must have seemed to him a long and terrible time, though in reality it was but an instant; then he came forward quickly to greet the new-comer, and if his face was still yellow-white there was nothing in his manner but the courtesy habitual with him. He took the lady's hand, and she smiled at him, but her eyes did not smile--they were hard. Ste. Marie, who was the nearest of the others, heard Captain Stewart say:

"This is an unexpected pleasure, my dearest Olga!"

And to that the lady replied, more loudly: "Yes, I returned to Paris only to-day. You didn't know, of course. I heard you were entertaining this evening, and so I came, knowing that I should be welcome."

"Always!" said Captain Stewart--"always more than welcome!"

He nodded to one or two of the men who stood near, and when they approached presented them. Ste. Marie observed that he used the lady's true name--she had, at times, found occasion to employ others--and that he politely called her "Madame Nilssen" instead of "Mademoiselle." But at that moment the lady caught sight of Ste. Marie, and, crying out his name in a tone of delighted astonishment, turned away from the other men, brushing past them as if they had been furniture, and advanced holding out both her hands in greeting.

"Dear Ste. Marie!" she exclaimed. "Fancy finding you here! I'm so glad! Oh, I'm so very glad! Take me away from these people! Find a corner where we can talk. Ah, there is one with a big seat! Allons-y!"

She addressed him for the most part in English, which she spoke perfectly--as perfectly as she spoke French and German and, presumably, her native tongue, which must have been Swedish.

They went to the broad, low seat, a sort of hard-cushioned bench, which stood against one of the walls, and made themselves comfortable there by the only possible means, which, owing to the width of the thing, was to sit far back with their feet stuck straight out before them. Captain Stewart had followed them across the room and showed a strong tendency to remain. Ste. Marie observed that his eyes were hard and bright and very alert, and that there were two bright spots of color in his yellow cheeks. It occurred to Ste. Marie that the man was afraid to leave him alone with Olga Nilssen, and he smiled to himself, reflecting that the lady, even if indiscreetly inclined, could tell him nothing--save in details--that he did not already know. But after a few rather awkward moments Mile. Nilssen waved an irritated hand.

"Go away!" she said to her host. "Go away to your other guests! I want to talk to Ste. Marie. We have old times to talk over."

And after hesitating awhile uneasily, Captain Stewart turned back into the room; but for some time thereafter Ste. Marie was aware that a vigilant eye was being kept upon them and that their host was by no means at his ease.

When they were left alone together the girl turned to him and patted his arm affectionately. She said:

"Ah, but it is very good to see you again, mon cher ami! It has been so long!" She gave an abrupt frown. "What are you doing here?" she demanded.

And she said an unkind thing about her fellow-guests. She called them "canaille." She said:

"Why are you wasting your time among these canaille? This is not a place for you. Why did you come?"

"I don't know," said Ste. Marie. He was still a little resentful, and he said so. He said: "I didn't know it was going to be like this. I came because Stewart went rather out of his way to ask me. I'd known him in a very different milieu."

"Ah, yes!" she said, reflectively. "Yes, he does go into the world also, doesn't he? But this is what he likes, you know." Her lips drew back for an instant, and she said: "He is a pig-dog!"

Ste. Marie looked at her gravely. She had used that offensive name with a little too much fierceness. Her face had turned for an instant quite white, and her eyes had flashed out over the room a look that meant a great deal to any one who knew her as well as Ste. Marie did. He sat forward and lowered his voice. He said:

"Look here, Olga! I'm going to be very frank for a moment. May I?"

For just an instant the girl drew away from him with suspicion in her eyes, and something else, alertly defiant. Then she put out her hands to his arm.

"You may be what you like, dear Ste. Marie," she said, "and say what you like. I will take it all--and swallow it alive--good as gold. What are you going to do to me?"

"I've always been fair with you, haven't I?" he urged. "I've had disagreeable things to say or do, but--you knew always that I liked you and--where my sympathies were."

"Always! Always, mon cher!" she cried. "I trusted you always in everything. And there is no one else I trust. No one! No one!--Ste. Marie!"

"What then?" he asked.

"Ste. Marie," she said, "why did you never fall in love with me, as the other men did?"

"I wonder!" said he. "I don't know. Upon my word, I really don't know."

He was so serious about it that the girl burst into a shriek of laughter. And in the end he laughed, too.

"I expect it was because I liked you too well," he said, at last. "But come! We're forgetting my lecture. Listen to your grandpère Ste. Marie! I have heard--certain things--rumors--what you will. Perhaps they are foolish lies, and I hope they are. But if not, if the fear I saw in Stewart's face when you came here to-night, was--not without cause, let me beg you to have a care. You're much too savage, my dear child. Don't be so foolish as to--well, turn comedy into the other thing. In the first place, it's not worth while, and, in the second place, it recoils always. Revenge may be sweet. I don't know. But nowadays, with police courts and all that, it entails much more subsequent annoyance than it is worth. Be wise, Olga!"

"Some things, Ste. Marie," said the golden lady, "are worth all the consequences that may follow them."

She watched Captain Stewart across the room, where he stood chatting with a little group of people, and her beautiful face was as hard as marble and her eyes were as dark as a stormy night, and her mouth, for an instant, was almost like an animal's mouth--cruel and relentless.

Ste. Marie saw, and he began to be a bit alarmed in good earnest. In his warning he had spoken rather more seriously than he felt the occasion demanded, but he began at last to wonder if the occasion was not in reality very serious, indeed. He was sure, of course, that Olga Nilssen had come here on this evening to annoy Captain Stewart in some fashion. As he put it to himself, she probably meant to "make a row," and he would not have been in the least surprised if she had made it in the beginning, upon her very dramatic entrance. Nothing more calamitous than that had occurred to him. But when he saw the woman's face turned a little away and gazing fixedly at Captain Stewart, he began to be aware that there was tragedy very near him--or all the makings of it.

Mlle. Nilssen turned back to him. Her face was still hard, and her eyes dark and narrowed with their oddly Oriental look. She bent her shoulders together for an instant and her hands moved slowly in her lap, stretching out before her in a gesture very like a cat's when it wakes from sleep and yawns and extends its claws, as if to make sure that they are still there and ready for use.

"I feel a little like Samson to-night," she said. "I am tired of almost everything, and I should like very much to pull the world down on top of me and kill everybody in it--except you, Ste. Marie, dear; except you!--and be crushed under the ruins!"

"I think," said Ste. Marie, practically--and the speech sounded rather like one of Hartley's speeches--"I think it was not quite the world that Samson pulled down, but a temple--or a palace--something of that kind."

"Well," said the golden lady, "this place is rather like a temple--a Chinese temple, with the pig-dog for high-priest."

Ste. Marie frowned at her.

"What are you going to do?" he demanded, sharply. "What did you come here to do? Mischief of some kind--bien entendu--but what?"

"Do?" she said, looking at him with her narrowed eyes. "I? Why, what should I do? Nothing, of course! I merely said I should like to pull the place down. Of course, I couldn't do that quite literally, now, could I? No. It is merely a mood. I'm not going to do anything."

"You're not being honest with me," he said.

And at that her expression changed, and she patted his arm again with a gesture that seemed to beg forgiveness.

"Well, then," she said, "if you must know, maybe I did come here for a purpose. I want to have it out with our friend Captain Stewart about something. And Ste. Marie, dear," she pleaded, "please, I think you'd better go home first. I don't care about these other animals, but I don't want you dragged into any row of any sort. Please be a sweet Ste. Marie and go home. Yes?"

"Absolutely, no!" said Ste. Marie. "I shall stay, and I shall try my utmost to prevent you from doing anything foolish. Understand that! If you want to have rows with people, Olga, for Heaven's sake don't pick an occasion like this for the purpose. Have your rows in private!"

"I rather think I enjoy an audience," she said, with a reflective air, and Ste. Marie laughed aloud because he knew that the naïve speech was so very true. This lady, with her many good qualities and her bad ones--not a few, alas!--had an undeniable passion for red fire that had amused him very much on more than one past occasion.

"Please go home!" she said once more.

But when the man only shook his head, she raised her hands a little way and dropped them again in her lap, in an odd gesture which seemed to say that she had done all she could do, and that if anything disagreeable should happen now, and he should be involved in it, it would be entirely his fault because she had warned him.

Then quite abruptly a mood of irresponsible gayety seemed to come upon her. She refused to have anything more to do with serious topics, and when Ste. Marie attempted to introduce them she laughed in his face. As she had said in the beginning she wished to do, she harked back to old days (the earlier stages of what might be termed the Morrison régime), and it seemed to afford her great delight to recall the happenings of that epoch. The conversation became a dialogue of reminiscence which would have been entirely unintelligible to a third person, and was, indeed, so to Captain Stewart, who once came across the room, made a feeble effort to attach himself, and presently wandered away again.

They unearthed from the past an exceedingly foolish song all about one "Little Willie" and a purple monkey climbing up a yellow stick. It was set to a well-known air from Don Giovanni, and when Duval, the basso, heard them singing it he came up and insisted upon knowing what it was about. He laughed immoderately over the English words when he was told what they meant, and made Ste. Marie write them down for him on two visiting-cards. So they made a trio out of "Little Willie," the great Duval inventing a bass part quite marvellous in its ingenuity, and they were compelled to sing it over and over again, until Ste. Marie's falsetto imitation of a tenor voice cracked and gave out altogether, since he was by nature barytone, if anything at all.

The other guests had crowded round to hear the extraordinary song, and when the song was at last finished several of them remained, so that Ste. Marie saw he was to be allowed an uninterrupted tête-à-tête with Olga Nilssen no longer. He therefore drifted away, after a few moments, and went with Duval and one of the other men across the room to look at some small jade objects--snuff-bottles, bracelets, buckles, and the like--which were displayed in a cabinet cleverly reconstructed out of a Japanese shrine. It was perhaps ten minutes later when he looked round the place and discovered that neither Mlle. Nilssen nor Captain Stewart was to be seen.

His first thought was of relief, for he said to himself that the two had sensibly gone into one of the other rooms to "have it out" in peace and quiet. But following that came the recollection of the woman's face when she had watched her host across the room. Her words came back to him: "I feel a little like Samson to-night.... I should like very much to pull the world down on top of me and kill everybody in it!" Ste. Marie thought of these things, and he began to be uncomfortable. He found himself watching the yellow-hung doorway beyond, with its intricate Chinese carving of trees and rocks and little groups of immortals, and he found that unconsciously he was listening for something--he did not know what--above the chatter and laughter of the people in the room. He endured this for possibly five minutes, and all at once found that he could endure it no longer. He began to make his way quietly through the groups of people toward the curtained doorway.

As he went, one of the women near by complained in a loud tone that the servant had disappeared. She wanted, it seemed, a glass of water, having already had many glasses of more interesting things. Ste. Marie said he would get it for her, and went on his way. He had an excuse now.

He found himself in a square, dimly lighted room much smaller than the other. There was a round table in the centre, so he thought it must be Stewart's dining-room. At the left a doorway opened into a place where there were lights, and at the other side was another door closed. From the room at the left there came a sound of voices, and though they were not loud, one of them, Mlle. Olga Nilssen's voice, was hard and angry and not altogether under control. The man would seem to have been attempting to pacify her, and he would seem not to have been very successful.

The first words that Ste. Marie was able to distinguish were from the woman. She said, in a low, fierce tone:

"That is a lie, my friend! That is a lie! I know all about the road to Clamart, so you needn't lie to me any longer. It's no good."

She paused for just an instant there, and in the pause St. Marie heard Stewart give a sort of inarticulate exclamation. It seemed to express anger and it seemed also to express fear. But the woman swept on, and her voice began to be louder. She said:

"I've given you your chance. You didn't deserve it, but I've given it you--and you've told me nothing but lies. Well, you'll lie no more. This ends it."

Upon that Ste. Marie heard a sudden stumbling shuffle of feet and a low, hoarse cry of utter terror--a cry more animal-like than human. He heard the cry break off abruptly in something that was like a cough and a whine together, and he heard the sound of a heavy body falling with a loose rattle upon the floor.

With the sound of that falling body he had already reached the doorway and torn aside the heavy portière. It was a sleeping-room he looked into, a room of medium size with two windows and an ornate bed of the Empire style set sidewise against the farther wall. There were electric lights upon imitation candles which were grouped in sconces against the wall, and these were turned on, so that the room was brightly illuminated. Midway between the door and the ornate Empire bed Captain Stewart lay huddled and writhing upon the floor, and Olga Nilssen stood upright beside him, gazing down upon him quite calmly. In her right hand, which hung at her side, she held a little flat black automatic pistol of the type known as Brownings--and they look like toys, but they are not.

Ste. Marie sprang at her silently and caught her by the arm, twisting the automatic pistol from her grasp, and the woman made no effort whatever to resist him. She looked into his face quite frankly and unmoved, and she shook her head.

"I haven't harmed him," she said. "I was going to, yes--and then myself--but he didn't give me a chance. He fell down in a fit." She nodded down toward the man who lay writhing at their feet. "I frightened him," she said, "and he fell in a fit. He's an epileptic, you know. Didn't you know that? Oh yes."

Abruptly she turned away shivering, and put up her hands over her face. And she gave an exclamation of uncontrollable repulsion.

"Ugh!" she cried, "it's horrible! Horrible! I can't bear to look. I saw him in a fit once before--long ago--and I couldn't bear even to speak to him for a month. I thought he had been cured. He said--Ah, it's horrible!"

Ste. Marie had dropped upon his knees beside the fallen man, and Mlle. Nilssen said, over her shoulder:

"Hold his head up from the floor, if you can bear to. He might hurt it."

It was not an easy thing to do, for Ste. Marie had the natural sense of repulsion in such matters that most people have, and this man's appearance, as Olga Nilssen had said, was horrible. The face was drawn hideously, and in the strong, clear light of the electrics it was a deathly yellow. The eyes were half closed, and the eyeballs turned up so that only the whites of them showed between the lids. There was froth upon the distorted mouth, and it clung to the catlike mustache and to the shallow, sunken chin beneath. But Ste. Marie exerted all his will power, and took the jerking, trembling head in his hands, holding it clear of the floor.

"You'd better call the servant," he said. "There may be something that can be done."

But the woman answered, without looking:

"No, there's nothing that can be done, I believe, except to keep him from bruising himself. Stimulants--that sort of thing--do more harm than good. Could you get him on the bed here?"

"Together we might manage it," said Ste. Marie. "Come and help!"

"I can't!" she cried, nervously. "I can't--touch him. Please, I can't do it."

"Come!" said the man, in a sharp tone. "It's no time for nerves. I don't like it, either, but it's got to be done."

The woman began a half-hysterical sobbing, but after a moment she turned and came with slow feet to where Stewart lay.

Ste. Marie slipped his arms under the man's body and began to raise him from the floor.

"You needn't help, after all," he said. "He's not heavy."

And, indeed, under his skilfully shaped and padded clothes the man was a mere waif of a man--as unbelievably slight as if he were the victim of a wasting disease. Ste. Marie held the body in his arms as if it had been a child, and carried it across and laid it on the bed; but it was many months before he forgot the horror of that awful thing shaking and twitching in his hold, the head thumping hideously upon his shoulder, the arms and legs beating against him. It was the most difficult task he had ever had to perform. He laid Captain Stewart upon the bed and straightened the helpless limbs as best he could.

"I suppose," he said, rising again--"I suppose when the man comes out of this he'll be frightfully exhausted and drop off to sleep, won't he? We'll have to--"

He halted abruptly there, and for a single swift instant he felt the black and rushing sensation of one who is going to faint away. The wall behind the ornate Empire bed was covered with photographs, some in frames, others left, as they had been received, upon the large squares of weird cardboard which are termed "art mounts."

"Come here a moment, quickly!" said Ste. Marie, in a sharp voice.

Mlle. Nilssen's sobs had died down to a silent, spasmodic catching of the breath, but she was still much unnerved, and she approached the bed with obvious unwillingness, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. Ste. Marie pointed to an unframed photograph which was fastened to the wall by thumb-tacks, and his outstretched hand shook as he pointed. Beneath them the other man still writhed and tumbled in his epileptic fit.

"Do you know who that woman is?" demanded Ste. Marie, and his tone was such that Olga Nilssen turned slowly and stared at him.

"That woman," said she, "is the reason why I wished to pull the world down upon Charlie Stewart and me to-night. That's who she is."

Ste. Marie gave a sort of cry.

"Who is she?" he insisted. "What is her name? I--have a particularly important reason for wanting to know. I've got to know."

Mlle. Nilssen shook her head, still staring at him.

"I can't tell you that," said she. "I don't know the name. I only know that--when he met her, he--I don't know her name, but I know where she lives and where he goes every day to see her--a house with a big garden and walled park on the road to Clamart. It's on the edge of the wood, not far from Fort d'Issy. The Clamart-Vanves-Issy tram runs past the wall of one side of the park. That's all I know."

Ste. Marie clasped his head with his hands.

"So near to it!" he groaned, "and yet--Ah!" He bent forward suddenly over the bed and spelled out the name of the photographer which was pencilled upon the brown cardboard mount. "There's still a chance," he said, "There's still one chance."

He became aware that the woman was watching him curiously, and nodded to her.

"It's something you don't know about," he explained. "I've got to find out who this--girl is. Perhaps the photographer can help me. I used to know him." All at once his eyes sharpened. "Tell me the simple truth about something!" said he. "If ever we have been friends, if you owe me any good office, tell me this: Do you know anything about young Arthur Benham's disappearance two months ago, or about what has become of him?"

Again the woman shook her head.

"No," said she. "Nothing at all. I hadn't even heard of it. Young Arthur Benham! I've met him once or twice. I wonder--I wonder Stewart never spoke to me about his disappearance! That's very odd."

"Yes," said Ste. Marie, absently, "it is." He gave a little sigh. "I wonder about a good many things," said he.

He glanced down upon the bed before them, and Captain Stewart lay still, save for a slight twitching of the hands. Once he moved his head restlessly from side to side and said something incoherent in a weak murmur.

"He's out of it," said Olga Nilssen. "He'll sleep now, I think. I suppose we must get rid of those people and then leave him to the care of his man. A doctor couldn't do anything for him."

"Yes," said Ste. Marie, nodding, "I'll call the servant and tell the people that Stewart has been taken ill."

He looked once more toward the photograph on the wall, and under his breath he said, with an odd, defiant fierceness: "I won't believe it!" But he did not explain what he wouldn't believe. He started out of the room, but, half-way, halted and turned back. He looked Olga Nilssen full in the eyes, saying:

"It is safe to leave you here with him while I call the servant? There'll be no more--?"

But the woman gave a low cry and a violent shiver with it.

"You need have no fear," she said. "I've no desire now to--harm him. The--reason is gone. This has cured me. I feel as if I could never bear to see him again. Oh, hurry! Please hurry! I want to get away from here!"

Ste. Marie nodded, and went out of the room.

XII

THE NAME OF THE LADY WITH THE EYES--EVIDENCE HEAPS UP SWIFTLY

Ste. Marie drove home to the rue d'Assas with his head in a whirl, and with a sense of great excitement beating somewhere within him--probably in the place where his heart ought to be. He had a curiously sure feeling that at last his feet were upon the right path. He could not have explained this to himself--indeed, there was nothing to explain, and if there had been he was in far too great an inner turmoil to manage it. It was a mere feeling--the sort of thing which he had once tried to express to Captain Stewart and had got laughed at for his pains.

There was, in sober fact, no reason whatever why Captain Stewart's possession of a photograph of the beautiful lady whom Ste. Marie had once seen in company with O'Hara should be taken as significant of anything except an appreciation of beauty on the part of Miss Benham's uncle--not even if, as Mlle. Nilssen believed, Captain Stewart was in love with the lady. But to Ste. Marie, in his whirl of reawakened excitement, the discovery loomed to the skies, and in a series of ingenious but very vague leaps of the imagination he saw himself, with the aid of this new evidence (which was no evidence at all, if he had been calm enough to realize it), victorious in his great quest: leading young Arthur Benham back to the arms of an ecstatic family, and kneeling at the feet of that youth's sister to claim his reward. All of which seems a rather startling flight of the imagination to have had its beginning in the sight of one photograph of a young woman. But, then, Ste. Marie was imaginative if he was anything.

He fell to thinking of this girl whose eyes, after one sight of them, had so long haunted him. He thought of her between those two men, the hard-faced Irish adventurer, and the other, Stewart, strange compound of intellectual and voluptuary, and his eyes flashed in the dark and he gripped his hands together upon his knees. He said again:

"I won't believe it! I won't believe it!" Believe what? one wonders.

He slept hardly at all: only, toward morning, falling into an uneasy doze. And in the doze he dreamed once more the dream of the dim, waste place and the hill, and the eyes and voice that called him back--because they needed him.

As early as he dared, after his morning coffee, he took a fiacre and drove across the river to the Boulevard de la Madeleine, where he climbed a certain stair, at the foot of which were two glass cases containing photographs of, for the most part, well-known ladies of the Parisian stage. At the top of the stair he entered the reception-room of a young photographer who is famous now the world over, but who, at the beginning of his career, when he had nothing but talent and no acquaintance, owed certain of his most important commissions to M. Ste. Marie.

The man, whose name was Bernstein, came forward eagerly from the studio beyond to greet his visitor, and Ste. Marie complimented him chaffingly upon his very sleek and prosperous appearance, and upon the new decorations of the little salon, which were, in truth, excellently well judged. But after they had talked for a little while of such matters, he said:

"I want to know if you keep specimen prints of all the photographs you have made within the past few months, and, if so, I should like to see them."

The young Jew went to a wooden portfolio-holder which stood in a corner, and dragged it out into the light.

"I have them all here," said he--"everything that I have made within the past ten or twelve months. If you will let me draw up a chair you can look them over comfortably."

He glanced at his former patron with a little polite curiosity as Ste. Marie followed his suggestion, and began to turn over the big portfolio's contents; but he did not show any surprise nor ask questions. Indeed, he guessed, to a certain extent, rather near the truth of the matter. It had happened before that young gentlemen--and old ones, too--wanted to look over his prints without offering explanations, and they generally picked out all the photographs there were of some particular lady and bought them if they could be bought.

So he was by no means astonished on this occasion, and he moved about the room putting things to rights, and even went for a few moments into the studio beyond until he was recalled by a sudden exclamation from his visitor--an exclamation which had a sound of mingled delight and excitement.

Ste. Marie held in his hands a large photograph, and he turned it toward the man who had made it.

"I am going to ask you some questions," said he, "that will sound rather indiscreet and irregular, but I beg you to answer them if you can, because the matter is of great importance to a number of people. Do you remember this lady?"

"Oh yes," said the Jew, readily, "I remember her very well. I never forget people who are as beautiful as this lady was." His eyes gleamed with retrospective joy. "She was splendid!" he declared. "Sumptuous! No, I cannot describe her. I have not the words. And I could not photograph her with any justice, either. She was all color: brown skin, with a dull-red stain under the cheeks, and a great mass of hair that was not black but very nearly black--except in the sun, and then there were red lights in it. She was a goddess, that lady, a queen of goddesses-- the young Juno before marriage--the--"

"Yes," interrupted Ste. Marie--"yes, I see. Yes, quite evidently she was beautiful; but what I wanted in particular to know was her name, if you feel that you have a right to give it to me (I remind you again that the matter is very important), and any circumstances that you can remember about her coming here: who came with her, for instance and things of that sort."

The photographer looked a little disappointed at being cut off in the middle of his rhapsody, but he began turning over the leaves of an order-book which lay upon a table near by.

"Here is the entry," he said, after a few moments. "Yes, I thought so, the date was nearly three months ago--April 5th. And the lady's name was Mlle. Coira O'Hara."

"What!" cried the other man, sharply. "What did you say?"

"Mlle. Coira O'Hara was the name," repeated the photographer. "I remember the occasion perfectly. The lady came here with three gentlemen--one tall, thin gentleman with an eyeglass, an Englishman, I think, though he spoke very excellent French when he spoke to me. Among themselves they spoke, I think, English, though I do not understand it, except a few words, such as ''ow moch?' and 'sank you' and 'rady, pleas', now.'"

"Yes! yes!" cried Ste. Marie, impatiently. And the little Jew could see that he was laboring under some very strong excitement, and he wondered mildly about it, scenting a love-affair.

"Then," he pursued, "there was a very young man in strange clothes--a tourist, I should think, like those Americans and English who come in the summer with little red books and sit on the terrace of the Café de la Paix." He heard his visitor draw a swift, sharp breath at that, but he hurried on before he could be interrupted. "This young man seemed to be unable to take his eyes from the lady--and small wonder! He was very much épris--very much épris, indeed. Never have I seen a youth more so. Ah, it was something to see, that--a thing to touch the heart!"

"What did the young man look like?" demanded Ste. Marie.

The photographer described the youth as best he could from memory, and he saw his visitor nod once or twice, and at the end he said:

"Yes, yes; I thought so. Thank you."

The Jew did not know what it was the other thought, but he went on:

"Ah, a thing to touch the heart! Such devotion as that! Alas, that the lady should seem so cold to it! Still, a goddess! What would you? A queen among goddesses. One would not have them laugh and make little jokes--make eyes at love-sick boys. No, indeed!" He shook his head rapidly and sighed.

M. Ste. Marie was silent for a little space, but at length he looked up as if he had just remembered something.

"And the third man?" he asked.

"Ah, yes, the third gentleman," said Bernstein. "I had forgotten him. The third gentleman I knew well. He had often been here. It was he who brought these friends to me. He was M. le Capitaine Stewart. Everybody knows M. le Capitaine Stewart--everybody in Paris."

Again he observed that his visitor drew a little, swift, sharp breath, and that he seemed to be laboring under some excitement.

However, Ste. Marie did not question him further, and so he went on to tell the little more he knew of the matter--how the four people had remained for an hour or more, trying many poses; how they had returned, all but the tall gentleman, three days later to see the proofs and to order certain ones to be printed (the young man paying on the spot in advance), and how the finished prints had been sent to M. le Capitaine Stewart's address.

When he had finished, his visitor sat for a long time silent, his head bent a little, frowning upon the floor and chafing his hands together over his knees. But at last he rose rather abruptly. He said:

"Thank you very much, indeed. You have done me a great service. If ever I can repay it, command me. Thank you!"

The Jew protested, smiling, that he was still too deeply in debt to M. Ste. Marie, and so, politely wrangling, they reached the door, and with a last expression of gratitude the visitor departed down the stair. A client came in just then for a sitting, and so the little photographer did not have an opportunity to wonder over the rather odd affair as much as he might have done. Indeed, in the press of work, it slipped from his mind altogether.

But down in the busy boulevard Ste. Marie stood hesitating on the curb. There were so many things to be done, in the light of these new developments, that he did not know what to do first.

"Mlle. Coira O'Hara!--Mademoiselle!" The thought gave him a sudden sting of inexplicable relief and pleasure. She would be O'Hara's daughter, then. And the boy, Arthur Benham (there was no room for doubt in the photographer's description) had seemed to be badly in love with her. This was a new development, indeed! It wanted thought, reflection, consultation with Richard Hartley. He signalled to a fiacre, and when it had drawn up before him sprang into it and gave Richard Hartley's address in the Avenue de l'Observatoire. But when they had gone a little way he changed his mind and gave another address, one in the Boulevard de la Tour Maubourg. It was where Mlle. Olga Nilssen lived. She had told him when he parted from her the evening before.

On the way he fell to thinking of what he had learned from the little photographer Bernstein, to setting the facts, as well as he could, in order, endeavoring to make out just how much or how little they signified by themselves or added to what he had known before. But he was in far too keen a state of excitement to review them at all calmly. As on the previous evening, they seemed to him to loom to the skies, and again he saw himself successful in his quest--victorious--triumphant. That this leap to conclusions was but a little less absurd than the first did not occur to him. He was in a fine fever of enthusiasm, and such difficulties as his eye perceived lay in a sort of vague mist to be dissipated later on, when he should sit quietly down with Hartley and sift the wheat from the chaff, laying out a definite scheme of action.

It occurred to him that in his interview with the photographer he had forgotten one point, and he determined to go back, later on, and ask about it. He had forgotten to inquire as to Captain Stewart's attitude toward the beautiful lady. Young Arthur Benham's infatuation had filled his mind at the time, and had driven out of it what Olga Nilssen had told him about Stewart. He found himself wondering if this point might not be one of great importance--the rivalry of the two men for O'Hara's daughter. Assuredly that demanded thought and investigation.

He found the prettily furnished apartment in the Avenue de la Tour Maubourg a scene of great disorder, presided over by a maid who seemed to be packing enormous quantities of garments into large trunks. The maid told him that her mistress, after a sleepless night, had departed from Paris by an early train, quite alone, leaving the servant to follow on when she had telegraphed or written an address. No, Mlle. Nilssen had left no address at all--not even for letters or telegrams. In short, the entire proceeding was, so the exasperated woman viewed it, everything that is imbecile.

Ste. Marie sat down on a hamper with his stick between his knees, and wrote a little note to be sent on when Mlle. Nilssen's whereabouts should be known. It was unfortunate, he reflected, that she should have fled away just now, but not of great importance to him, because he did not believe that he could learn very much more from her than he had learned already. Moreover, he sympathized with her desire to get away from Paris--as far away as possible from the man whom she had seen in so horrible a state on the evening past.

He had kept the fiacre at the door, and he drove at once back to the rue d'Assas. As he started to mount the stair the concierge came out of her loge to say that Mr. Hartley had called soon after Monsieur had left the house that morning, had seemed very much disappointed on not finding Monsieur, and before going away again had had himself let into Monsieur's apartment with the key of the femme de ménage, and had written a note which Monsieur would find là haut.

Ste. Marie thanked the woman, and went on up to his rooms, wondering why Hartley had bothered to leave a note instead of waiting or returning at lunch-time, as he usually did. He found the communication on his table and read it at once. Hartley said:

I have to go across the river to the Bristol to see some relatives who are turning up there to-day, and who will probably keep me until evening, and then I shall have to go back there to dine. So I'm leaving a word for you about some things I discovered last evening. I met Miss Benham at Armenonville, where I dined, and in a tête-à-tête conversation we had after dinner she let fall two facts which seem to me very important. They concern Captain S. In the first place, when he told us that day, some time ago, that he knew nothing about his father's will or any changes that might have been made in it, he lied. It seems that old David, shortly after the boy's disappearance, being very angry at what he considered, and still considers, a bit of spite on the boy's part, cut young Arthur Benham out of his will and transferred that share to Captain S. (Miss Benham learned this from the old man only yesterday). Also it appears that he did this after talking the matter over with Captain S., who affected unwillingness. So, as the will reads now, Miss B. and Captain S. stand to share equally the bulk of the old man's money, which is several millions--in dollars, of course. Miss B.'s mother is to have the interest of half of both shares as long as she lives. Now mark this: Prior to this new arrangement, Captain S. was to receive only a small legacy, on the ground that he already had a respectable fortune left him by his mother, old David's first wife (I've heard, by-the-way, that he has squandered a good share of this.)

Miss B. is, of course, much cut up over the injustice to the boy, but she can't protest too much, as it only excites old David. She says the old man is much weaker.

You see, of course, the significance of all this. If David Stewart dies, as he's likely to do, before young Arthur's return, Captain S. gets the money.

The second fact I learned was that Miss Benham did not tell her uncle about her semi-engagement to you or about your volunteering to search for the boy. She thinks her grandfather must have told him. I didn't say so to her, but that is hardly possible in view of the fact that Stewart came on here to your rooms very soon after you had reached them yourself.

So that makes two lies for our gentle friend--and serious lies, both of them. To my mind, they point unmistakably to a certain conclusion. Captain S. has been responsible for putting his nephew out of the way. He has either hidden him somewhere and is keeping him in confinement, or he has killed him.

I wish we could talk it over to-day, but, as you see, I'm helpless. Remain in to-night, and I'll come as soon as I can get rid of these confounded people of mine.

One word more. Be careful! Miss B. is, up to this point, merely puzzled over things. She doesn't suspect her uncle of any crookedness, I'm sure. So we shall have to tread softly where she is concerned.

I shall see you to-night. R.H.

Ste. Marie read the closely written pages through twice, and he thought how like his friend it was to take the time and trouble to put what he had learned into this clear, concise form. Another man would have scribbled, "Important facts--tell you all about it to-night," or something of that kind. Hartley must have spent a quarter of an hour over his writing.

Ste. Marie walked up and down the room with all his strength forcing his brain to quiet, reasonable action. Once he said, aloud:

"Yes, you're right, of course. Stewart has been at the bottom of it all along." He realized that he had been for some days slowly arriving at that conclusion, and that since the night before he had been practically certain of it, though he had not yet found time to put his suspicions into logical order. Hartley's letter had driven the truth concretely home to him, but he would have reached the same truth without it--though that matter of the will was of the greatest importance. It gave him a strong weapon to strike with.

He halted before one of the front windows, and his eyes gazed unseeing across the street into the green shrubbery of the Luxembourg Gardens. The lace curtains had been left by the femme de ménage hanging straight down, and not, as usual, looped back to either side, so he could see through them with perfect ease, although he could not be seen from outside.

He became aware that a man who was walking slowly up and down a path inside the high iron palings was in some way familiar to him, and his eyes sharpened. The man was inconspicuously dressed, and looked like almost any other man whom one might pass in the streets without taking any notice of him; but Ste. Marie knew that he had seen him often, and he wondered how and where. There was a row of lilac shrubs against the iron palings just inside and between the palings and the path, but two of the shrubs were dead and leafless, and each time the man passed this spot he came into plain view; each time, also, he directed an oblique glance toward the house opposite. Presently he turned aside and sat down upon one of the public benches, where he was almost, but not quite, hidden by the intervening foliage.

Then at last Ste. Marie gave a sudden exclamation and smote his hands together.

"The fellow's a spy!" he cried, aloud. "He's watching the house to see when I go out." He began to remember how he had seen the man in the street and in cafés and restaurants, and he remembered that he had once or twice thought it odd, but without any second thought of suspicion. So the fellow had been set to spy upon him, watch his goings and comings and report them to--no need of asking to whom.

Ste. Marie stood behind his curtains and looked across into the pleasant expanse of shrubbery and greensward. He was wondering if it would be worth while to do anything. Men and women went up and down the path, hurrying or slowly, at ease with the world--laborers, students, bonnes with market-baskets in their hands and long bread loaves under their arms, nurse-maids herding small children, bigger children spinning diabolo spools as they walked. A man with a pointed black beard and a soft hat passed once and returned to seat himself upon the public bench that Ste. Marie was watching. For some minutes he sat there idle, holding the soft felt hat upon his knees for coolness. Then he turned and looked at the other occupant of the bench, and Ste. Marie thought he saw the other man nod, though he could not be sure whether either one spoke or not. Presently the new-comer rose, put on the soft hat again, and disappeared down the path going toward the gate at the head of the rue du Luxembourg.

Five minutes later the door-bell rang.

XIII

THE VOYAGE TO COLCHIS

Ste. Marie turned away from the window and crossed to the door. The man with the pointed beard removed his soft hat, bowed very politely, and asked if he had the honor to address M. Ste. Marie.

"That is my name," said Ste. Marie. "Entrez, Monsieur!" He waved his visitor to a chair and stood waiting.

The man with the beard bowed once more. He said:

"I have not the great honor of Monsieur's acquaintance, but circumstances, which I will explain later, have put it in my power--have made it a sacred duty, if I may be permitted to say the word--to place in Monsieur's hands a piece of information."

Ste. Marie smiled slightly and sat down. He said:

"I listen with pleasure--and anticipation. Pray go on!"

"I have information," said the visitor, "of the whereabouts of M. Arthur Benham."

Ste. Marie waved his hand.

"I feared as much," said he. "I mean to say, I hoped so. Proceed, Monsieur!"

"And learning," continued the other, "that M. Ste. Marie was conducting a search for that young gentleman, I hastened at once to place this information in his hands."

"At a price," suggested his host. "At a price, to be sure."

The man with the beard spread out his hands in a beautiful and eloquent gesture which well accompanied his Marseillais accent.

"Ah, as to that!" he protested. "My circumstances--I am poor, Monsieur. One must gain the livelihood. What would you? A trifle. The merest trifle."

"Where is Arthur Benham?" asked Ste. Marie.

"In Marseilles, Monsieur. I saw him a week ago--six days. And, so far as I could learn, he had no intention of leaving there immediately--though it is, to be sure, hot."

Ste. Marie laughed a laugh of genuine amusement, and the man with the pointed beard stared at him with some wonder. Ste. Marie rose and crossed the room to a writing-desk which stood against the opposite wall. He fumbled in a drawer of this, and returned holding in his hand a pink-and-blue note of the Banque de France. He said:

"Monsieur--pardon! I have forgotten to ask the name--you have remarked quite truly that one must gain a livelihood. Therefore, I do not presume to criticise the way in which you gain yours. Sometimes one cannot choose. However, I should like to make a little bargain with you, Monsieur. I know, of course, being not altogether imbecile, who sent you here with this story and why you were sent--why, also, your friend who sits upon the bench in the garden across the street follows me about and spies upon me. I know all this, and I laugh at it a little. But, Monsieur, to amuse myself further, I have a desire to hear from your own lips the name of the gentleman who is your employer. Amusement is almost always expensive, and so I am prepared to pay for this. I have here a note of one hundred francs. It is yours in return for the name--the right name. Remember, I know it already."

The man with the pointed beard sprang to his feet quivering with righteous indignation. All Southern Frenchmen, like all other Latins, are magnificent actors. He shook one clinched hand in the air, his face was pale, and his fine eyes glittered. Richard Hartley would have put himself promptly in an attitude of defence, but Ste. Marie nodded a smiling head in appreciation. He was half a Southern Frenchman himself.

"Monsieur!" cried his visitor, in a choked voice, "Monsieur, have a care! You insult me! Have a care, Monsieur! I am dangerous! My anger, when roused, is terrible!"

"I am cowed," observed Ste. Marie, lighting a cigarette. "I quail."

"Never," declaimed the gentleman from Marseilles, "have I received an insult without returning blow for blow! My blood boils!"

"The hundred francs, Monsieur," said Ste. Marie, "will doubtless cool it. Besides, we stray from our sheep. Reflect, my friend! I have not insulted you. I have asked you a simple question. To be sure, I have said that I knew your errand here was not--not altogether sincere, but I protest, Monsieur, that no blame attaches to yourself. The blame is your employer's. You have performed your mission with the greatest of honesty--the most delicate and faithful sense of honor. That is understood."

The gentleman with the beard strode across to one of the windows and leaned his head upon his hand. His shoulders still heaved with emotion, but he no longer trembled. The terrible crisis bade fair to pass. Then, abruptly, in the frank and open Latin way, he burst into tears, and wept with copious profusion, while Ste. Marie smoked his cigarette and waited.

When at length the Marseillais turned back into the room he was calm once more, but there remained traces of storm and flood. He made a gesture of indescribable and pathetic resignation.

"Monsieur," he exclaimed, "you have a heart of gold--of gold, Monsieur! You understand. Behold us, two men of honor! Monsieur," he said, "I had no choice. I was poor. I saw myself face to face with the misère. What would you? I fell. We are all weak flesh. I accepted the commission of the pig who sent me here to you."

Ste. Marie smoothed the pink-and-blue bank-note in his hands, and the other man's eye clung to it as though he were starving and the bank-note was food.

"The name?" prompted Ste. Marie.

The gentleman from Marseilles tossed up his hands.

"Monsieur already knows it. Why should I hesitate? The name is Ducrot."

"What!" cried Ste. Marie, sharply. "What is that? Ducrot?"

"But naturally!" said the other man, with some wonder. "Monsieur said he knew. Certainly, Ducrot. A little, withered man, bald on the top of the head, creases down the cheeks, a mustache like this"--he made a descriptive gesture--"a little chin. A man like an elderly cat. M. Ducrot."

Ste. Marie gave a sigh of relief.

"Yes, yes," said he. "Ducrot is as good a name as another. The gentleman has more than one, it appears. Monsieur, the hundred-franc note is yours."

The gentleman from Marseilles took it with a slightly trembling hand, and began to bow himself toward the door as if he feared that his host would experience a change of heart; but Ste. Marie checked him, saying:

"One moment. I was thinking," said he, "that you would perhaps not care to present yourself to your--employer, M. Ducrot, immediately--not for a few days, at least, in view of the fact that certain actions of mine will show him your mission has--well, miscarried. It would, perhaps, be well for you not to communicate with M. Ducrot. He might be displeased with you."

"Monsieur," said the gentleman with the beard, "you speak with acumen and wisdom. I shall neglect to report myself to M. Ducrot, who, I repeat, is a pig."

"And," pursued Ste. Marie, "the individual on the bench across the street?"

"It is not necessary that I meet that individual, either!" said the Marseillais, hastily. "Monsieur, I bid you adieu!" He bowed again, a profound, a scraping bow, and disappeared through the door.

Ste. Marie crossed to the window and looked down upon the pavement below. He saw his late visitor emerge from the house and slip rapidly down the street toward the rue Vavin. He glanced across into the gardens and the spy still sat there on his bench, but his head lay back and he slept--the sleep of the unjust. One imagined that he must be snoring, for an incredibly small urchin in a blue apron stood on the path before him and watched with the open mouth of astonishment.

Ste. Marie turned back into the room, and began to tramp up and down as was his way in a perplexity or in any time of serious thought. He wished very much that Richard Hartley were there to consult with. He considered Hartley to have a judicial mind--a mind to establish, out of confusion, something like logical order, and he was very well aware that he himself had not that sort of mind at all. In action he was sufficiently confident of himself, but to construct a course of action he was afraid, and he knew that a misstep now, at this critical point, might be fatal--turn success into disaster.

He fell to thinking of Captain Stewart (alias M. Ducrot) and he longed most passionately to leap into a fiacre at the corner below, to drive at a gallop across the city to the rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, to fall upon that smiling hypocrite in his beautiful treasure-house, to seize him by the withered throat and say:

"Tell me what you have done with Arthur Benham before I tear your head from your miserable body!"

Indeed, he was far from sure that this was not what it would come to, in the end, for he reflected that he had not only a tremendous accumulation of evidence with which to face Captain Stewart, but also a very terrible weapon to hold over his head--the threat of exposure to the old man who lay slowly dying in the rue de l'Université! A few words in old David's ear, a few proofs of their truth, and the great fortune for which the son had sold his soul--if he had any left to sell--must pass forever out of his reach, like gold seen in a dream.

This is what it might well come to, he said to himself. Indeed, it seemed to him at that moment far the most feasible plan, for to such accusations, such demands as that, Captain Stewart could offer no defence. To save himself from a more complete ruin he would have to give up the boy or tell what he knew of him. But Ste. Marie was unwilling to risk everything on this throw without seeing Richard Hartley first, and Hartley was not to be had until evening.

He told himself that, after all, there was no immediate hurry, for he was quite sure the man would be compelled to keep to his bed for a day or two. He did not know much about epilepsy, but he knew that its paroxysms were followed by great exhaustion, and he felt sure that Stewart was far too weak in body to recuperate quickly from any severe call upon his strength. He remembered how light that burden had been in his arms the night before, and then an uncontrollable shiver of disgust went over him as he remembered the sight of the horribly twisted and contorted face, felt again the shaking, thumping head as it beat against his shoulder. He wondered how much Stewart knew, how much he would be able to remember of the events of the evening before, and he was at a loss there because of his unfamiliarity with epileptic seizures. Of one thing, however, he was almost certain, and that was that the man could scarcely have been conscious of who were beside him when the fit was over. If he had come at all to his proper senses before the ensuing slumber of exhaustion, it must have been after Mlle. Nilssen and himself had gone away.

Upon that he fell to wondering about the spy and the gentleman from Marseilles--he was a little sorry that Hartley could not have seen the gentleman from Marseilles--but he reflected that the two were, without doubt, acting upon old orders, and that the latter had probably been stalking him for some days before he found him at home.

He looked at his watch and it was half-past twelve. There was nothing to be done, he considered, but wait--get through the day somehow; and so, presently, he went out to lunch. He went up the rue Vavin to the Boulevard Montparnasse and down that broad thoroughfare to Lavenue's, on the busy Place de Rennes, where the cooking is the best in all this quarter, and can, indeed, hold up its head without shame in the face of those other more widely famous restaurants across the river, frequented by the smart world and by the travelling gourmet.

He went through to the inner room, which is built like a raised loggia round two sides of a little garden, and which is always cool and fresh in summer. He ordered a rather elaborate lunch, and thought that he sat a very long time at it, but when he looked again at his watch only an hour and a half had gone by. It was a quarter-past two. Ste. Marie was depressed. There remained almost all of the afternoon to be got through, and Heaven alone could say how much of the evening, before he could have his consultation with Richard Hartley. He tried to think of some way of passing the time, but although he was not usually at a loss he found his mind empty of ideas. None of his common occupations recommended themselves to him. He knew that whatever he tried to do he would interrupt it with pulling out his watch every half-hour or so and cursing the time because it lagged so slowly. He went out to the terrace for coffee, very low in his mind.

But half an hour later, as he sat behind his little marble-topped table, smoking and sipping a liqueur, his eyes fell upon something across the square which brought him to his feet with a sudden exclamation. One of the big electric trams that ply between the Place St. Germain des Prés and Clamart, by way of the Porte de Versailles and Vanves, was dragging its unwieldy bulk round the turn from the rue de Rennes into the boulevard. He could see the sign-board along the impériale--"Clamart-St. Germain des Prés," with "Issy" and "Vanves" in brackets between.

Ste. Marie clinked a franc upon the table and made off across the Place at a run. Omnibuses from Batignolles and Menilmontant got in his way, fiacres tried to run him down, and a motor-car in a hurry pulled up just in time to save his life, but Ste. Marie ran on and caught the tram before it had completed the negotiation of the long curve and gathered speed for its dash down the boulevard. He sprang upon the step, and the conductor reluctantly unfastened the chain to admit him. So he climbed up to the top and seated himself, panting. The dial high on the façade of the Gare Montparnasse said ten minutes to three.

He had no definite plan of action. He had started off in this headlong fashion upon the spur of a moment's impulse, and because he knew where the tram was going. Now, embarked, he began to wonder if he was not a fool. He knew every foot of the way to Clamart, for it was a favorite half-day's excursion with him to ride there in this fashion, walk thence through the beautiful Meudon wood across to the river, and from Bellevue or Bas-Meudon take a Suresnes boat back into the city. He knew, or thought he knew, just where lay the house, surrounded by garden and half-wild park, of which Olga Nilssen had told him; he had often wondered whose place it was as the tram rolled along the length of its high wall. But he knew, also, that he could do nothing there, single-handed and without excuse or preparation. He could not boldly ring the bell, demand speech with Mile. Coira O'Hara, and ask her if she knew anything of the whereabouts of young Arthur Benham, whom a photographer had suspected of being in love with her. He certainly could not do that. And there seemed to be nothing else that--Ste. Marie broke off this somewhat despondent course of reasoning with a sudden little voiceless cry. For the first time it occurred to him to connect the house on the Clamart road and Mlle. Coira O'Hara and young Arthur Benham (it will be remembered that the man had not yet had time to arrange his suddenly acquired mass of evidence in logical order and to make deductions from it), for the first time he began to put two and two together. Stewart had hidden away his nephew; this nephew was known to have been much enamoured of the girl Coira O'Hara; Coira O'Hara was said to be living--with her father, probably--in the house on the outskirts of Paris, where she was visited by Captain Stewart. Was not the inference plain enough--sufficiently reasonable? It left, without doubt, many puzzling things to be explained--perhaps too many; but Ste. Marie sat forward in his seat, his eyes gleaming, his face tense with excitement.

"Is young Arthur Benham in the house on the Clamart road?"

He said the words almost aloud, and he became aware that the fat woman with a live fowl at her feet and the butcher's boy on his other side were looking at him curiously. He realized that he was behaving in an excited manner, and so sat back and lowered his eyes. But over and over within him the words said themselves--over and over, until they made a sort of mad, foolish refrain.

"Is Arthur Benham in the house on the Clamart road? Is Arthur Benham in the house on the Clamart road?" He was afraid that he would say it aloud once more, and, he tried to keep a firm hold upon himself.

The tram swung into the rue de Sevres, and rolled smoothly out the long, uninteresting stretch of the rue Lecourbe, far out to where the houses, became scattered, where mounds and pyramids of red tiles stood alongside the factory where they had been made, where an acre of little glass hemispheres in long, straight rows winked and glistened in the afternoon sun--the forcing-beds of some market gardener; out to the Porte de Versailles at the city wall, where a group of customs officers sprawled at ease before their little sentry-box or loafed over to inspect an incoming tram.

A bugle sounded and a drum beat from the great fosse under the wall, and a company of piou-pious, red-capped, red-trousered, shambled through their evolutions in a manner to break the heart of a British or a German drill-sergeant. Then out past level fields to little Vanves, with its steep streets and its old gray church, and past the splendid grounds of the Lycée beyond. The fat woman got down, her live fowl shrieking protest to the movement, and the butcher's boy got down, too, so that Ste. Marie was left alone upon the impériale save for a snuffy old gentleman in a pot-hat who sat in a corner buried behind the day's Droits de l'Homme.

Ste. Marie moved forward once more and laid his arms upon the iron rail before him. They were coming near. They ran past plum and apple orchards and past humble little detached villas, each with a bit of garden in front and an acacia or two at the gate-posts. But presently, on the right, the way began to be bordered by a high stone wall, very long, behind which showed the trees of a park, and among them, far back from the wall beyond a little rise of ground, the gables and chimneys of a house could be made out. The wall went on for perhaps a quarter of a mile in a straight sweep, but half-way the road swung apart from it to the left, dipped under a stone railway bridge, and so presently ended at the village of Clamart.

As the tram approached the beginning of that long stone wall it began to slacken speed, there was a grating noise from underneath, and presently it came to an abrupt halt. Ste. Marie looked over the guard-rail and saw that the driver had left his place and was kneeling in the dust beside the car peering at its underworks. The conductor strolled round to him after a moment and stood indifferently by, remarking upon the strange vicissitudes to which electrical propulsion is subject. The driver, without looking up, called his colleague a number of the most surprising and, it is to be hoped, unwarranted names, and suddenly began to burrow under the tram, wriggling his way after the manner of a serpent until nothing could be seen of him but two unrestful feet. His voice, though muffled, was still tolerably distinct. It cursed, in an unceasing staccato and with admirable ingenuity, the tram, the conductor, the sacred dog of an impediment which had got itself wedged into one of the trucks, and the world in general.

Ste. Marie, sitting aloft, laughed for a moment, and then turned his eager eyes upon what lay across the road. The halt had taken place almost exactly at the beginning of that long stretch of park wall which ran beside the road and the tramway. From where he sat he could see the other wing which led inward from the road at something like a right angle, but was presently lost to sight because of a sparse and unkempt patch of young trees and shrubs, well-nigh choked with undergrowth, which extended for some distance from the park wall backward along the road-side toward Vanves. Whoever owned that stretch of land had seemingly not thought it worth while to cultivate it or to build upon it or even to clear it off.

Ste. Marie's first thought, as his eye scanned the two long stretches of wall and looked over their tops to the trees of the park and the far-off gables and chimneys of the house, was to wonder where the entrance to the place could be, and he decided that it must be on the side opposite to the Clamart tram-line. He did not know the smaller roads hereabouts, but he guessed that there must be one somewhere beyond, between the route de Clamart and Fort d'Issy, and he was right. There is a little road between the two; it sweeps round in a long curve and ends near the tiny public garden in Issy, and it is called the rue Barbés.

His second thought was that this unkempt patch of tree and brush offered excellent cover for any one who might wish to pass an observant hour alongside that high stone wall; for any one who might desire to cast a glance over the lie of the land, to see at closer range that house of which so little could be seen from the route de Clamart, to look over the wall's coping into park and garden.

The thought brought him to his feet with a leaping heart, and before he realized that he had moved he found himself in the road beside the halted tram. The conductor brushed past him, mounting to his place, and from the platform beckoned, crying out:

"En voiture, Monsieur! En voiture!"

Again something within Ste. Marie that was not his conscious direction acted for him, and he shook his head. The conductor gave two little blasts upon his horn, the tram wheezed and moved forward. In a moment it was on its way, swinging along at full speed toward the curve in the line that bore to the left and dipped under the railway bridge. Ste. Marie stood in the middle of that empty road, staring after it until it had disappeared from view.

XIV

THE WALLS OF AEA

Ste. Marie had acted upon an impulse of which he was scarcely conscious at all, and when he found himself standing alone in the road and watching the Clamart tram disappear under the railway bridge he called himself hard names and wondered what he was to do next. He looked before and behind him, and there was no living soul in sight. He bent his eyes again upon that unkempt patch of young trees and undergrowth, and once more the thought forced itself to his brain that it would make excellent cover for one who wished to observe a little--to reconnoitre.

He knew that it was the part of wisdom to turn his back upon this place, to walk on to Clamart or return to Vanves and mount upon a homeward-bound tram. He knew that it was the part of folly, of madness even, to expose himself to possible discovery by some one within the walled enclosure. What though no one there were able to recognize him, still the sight of a man prowling about the walls, seeking to spy over them, might excite an alarm that would lead to all sorts of undesirable complications. Dimly Ste. Marie realized all this, and he tried to turn his back and walk away, but the patch of little trees and shrubbery drew him with an irresistible fascination. "Just a little look along that unknown wall," he said to himself, "just the briefest of all brief reconnaissances, the merest glance beyond the masking screen of wood growth, so that in case of sudden future need he might have the lie of the place clear in his mind;" for without any sound reason for it he was somehow confident that this walled house and garden were to play an important part in the rescue of Arthur Benham. It was once more a matter of feeling. The rather womanlike intuition which had warned him that O'Hara was concerned in young Benham's disappearance, and that the two were not far from Paris, was again at work in him, and he trusted it as he had done before.

He gave a little nod of determination, as one who, for good or ill, casts a die, and he crossed the road. There was a deep ditch, and he had to climb down into it and up its farther side, for it was too broad to be jumped. So he came into the shelter of the young poplars and elms and oaks. The underbrush caught at his clothes, and the dead leaves of past seasons crackled underfoot; but after a little space he came to somewhat clearer ground, though the saplings still stood thick about him and hid him securely.

He made his way inward along the wall, keeping a short distance back from it, and he saw that after twenty or thirty yards it turned again at a very obtuse angle away from him and once more ran on in a long straight line. Just beyond this angle he came upon a little wooden door thickly studded with nails. It was made to open inward, and on the outside there was no knob or handle of any kind, only a large key-hole of the simple, old-fashioned sort. Slipping up near to look, Ste. Marie observed that the edges of the key-hole were rusty, but scratched a little through the rust with recent marks; so the door, it seemed, was sometimes used. He observed another thing. The ground near by was less encumbered with trees than at any other point, and the turf was depressed with many wheel marks--broad marks, such as are made only by the wheels of a motor-car. He followed these tracks for a little distance, and they wound in and out among the trees, and beyond the thin fringe of wood swept away in a curve toward Issy, doubtless to join the road which he had already imagined to lie somewhere beyond the enclosure.

Beyond the more open space about this little door the young trees stood thick together again, and Ste. Marie pressed cautiously on. He stopped now and then to listen, and once he thought that he heard from within the sound of a woman's laugh, but he could not be sure. The slight change of direction had confused him a little, and he was uncertain as to where the house lay. The wall was twelve or fifteen feet high, and from the level of the ground he could, of course, see nothing over it but tree tops. He went on for what may have been a hundred yards, but it seemed to him very much more than that, and he came to a tall gnarled cedar-tree which stood almost against the high wall. It was half dead, but its twisted limbs were thick and strong, and by force of the tree's cramped position they had grown in strange and grotesque forms. One of them stretched across the very top of the stone wall, and with the wind's action it had scraped away the coping of tiles and bottle-glass and had made a little depression there to rest in.

Ste. Marie looked up along this natural ladder, and temptation smote him sorely. It was so easy and so safe! There was enough foliage left upon the half-dead tree to screen him well, but whether or no it is probable that he would have yielded to the proffered lure. There seems to have been more than chance in Ste. Marie's movements upon this day; there seems to have been something like the hand of Fate in them--as doubtless there is in most things, if one but knew.

He left his hat and stick behind him, under a shrub, and he began to make his way up the half-bare branches of the gnarled cedar. They bore him well, without crack or rustle, and the way was very easy. No ladder made by man could have offered a much simpler ascent. So, mounting slowly and with care, his head came level with the top of the wall. He climbed to the next branch, a foot higher, and rested there. The drooping foliage from the upper part of the cedar-tree, which was still alive, hung down over him and cloaked him from view, but through its aromatic screen he could see as freely as through the window curtain in the rue d'Assas.

The house lay before him, a little to the left and perhaps a hundred yards away. It was a disappointing house to find in that great enclosure, for though it was certainly neither small nor trivial, it was as certainly far from possessing anything like grandeur. It had been in its day a respectable, unpretentious square structure of three stories, entirely without architectural beauty, but also entirely without the ornate hideousness of the modern villas along the route de Clamart. Now, however, the stucco was gone in great patches from its stone walls, giving them an unpleasantly diseased look, and long neglect of all decent cares had lent the place the air almost of desertion. Anciently the grounds before the house had been laid out in the formal fashion with a terrace and geometrical lawns and a pool and a fountain and a rather fine, long vista between clipped larches, but the same neglect which had made shabby the stuccoed house had allowed grass and weeds to grow over the gravel paths, underbrush to spring up and to encroach upon the geometrical turf-plots, the long double row of clipped larches to flourish at will or to die or to fall prostrate and lie where they had fallen.

So all the broad enclosure was a scene of heedless neglect, a riot of unrestrained and wanton growth, where should have been decorous and orderly beauty. It was a sight to bring tears to a gardener's eyes, but it had a certain untamed charm of its own, for all that. The very riot of it, the wanton prodigality of untouched natural growth, produced an effect that was by no means all disagreeable.

An odd and whimsical thought came into Ste. Marie's mind that thus must have looked the garden and park round the castle of the sleeping beauty when the prince came to wake her.

But sleeping beauties and unkempt grounds went from him in a flash when he became aware of a sound which was like the sound of voices. Instinctively he drew farther back into the shelter of his aromatic screen. His eyes swept the space below him from right to left, and could see no one. So he sat very still, save for the thunderous beat of a heart which seemed to him like drum-beats when soldiers are marching, and he listened--"all ears," as the phrase goes.

The sound was in truth a sound of voices. He was presently assured of that, but for some time he could not make out from which direction it came. And so he was the more startled when quite suddenly there appeared from behind a row of tall shrubs two young people moving slowly together up the untrimmed turf in the direction of the house.

The two young people were Mlle. Coira O'Hara and Arthur Benham, and upon the brow of this latter youth there was no sign of dungeon pallor, upon his free-moving limbs no ball and chain. There was no apparent reason why he should not hasten back to the eager arms in the rue de l'Université if he chose to--unless, indeed, his undissembling attitude toward Mlle. Coira O'Hara might serve as a reason. The young man followed at her heel with much the manner and somewhat the appearance of a small dog humbly conscious of unworthiness, but hopeful nevertheless of an occasional kind word or pat on the head.

The world wheeled multi-colored and kaleidoscopic before Ste. Marie's eyes, and in his ears there was a rushing of great winds, but he set his teeth and clung with all the strength he had to the tree which sheltered him. His first feeling, after that initial giddiness, was anger, sheer anger, a bewildered and astonished fury. He had thought to find this poor youth in captivity, pining through prison bars for the home and the loved ones and the familiar life from which he had been ruthlessly torn. Yet here he was strolling in a suburban garden with a lady--free, free as air, or so he seemed. Ste. Marie thought of the grim and sorrowful old man in Paris who was sinking untimely into his grave because his grandson did not return to him; he thought of that timid soul--more shadow than woman--the boy's mother; he thought of Helen Benham's tragic eyes, and he could have beaten young Arthur half to death in that moment in the righteous rage that stormed within him.

But he turned his eyes from this wretched youth to the girl who walked beside, a little in advance, and the rage died in him swiftly.

After all, was she not one to make any boy--or any man--forget duty, home, friends, everything?

Rather oddly his mind flashed back to the morning and to the words of the little photographer, Bernstein. Perhaps the Jew had put it as well as any man could:

"She was a goddess, that lady, a queen of goddesses ... the young Juno before marriage...."

Ste. Marie nodded his head. Yes, she was just that. The little Jew had spoken well. It could not be more fairly put--though without doubt it could have been expressed at much greater length and with a great deal more eloquence. The photographer's other words came also to his mind, the more detailed description, and again he nodded his head, for this, too, was true.

"She was all color--brown skin with a dull-red stain under the cheeks, and a great mass of hair that was not black but very nearly black--except in the sun, and then there were red lights in it."

It occurred to Ste. Marie, whimsically, that the two young people might have stepped out of the door of Bernstein's studio straight into this garden, judging from their bearing each to the other.

"Ah, a thing to touch the heart! Such devotion as that! Alas, that the lady should seem so cold to it! ... Still, a goddess! What would you? A queen among goddesses! ... One would not have them laugh and make little jokes.... Make eyes at love-sick boys. No, indeed!"

Certainly Mlle. Coira O'Hara was not making eyes at the love-sick boy who followed at her heel this afternoon. Perhaps it would be going too far to say that she was cold to him, but it was very plain to see that she was bored and weary, and that she wished she might be almost anywhere else than where she was. She turned her beautiful face a little toward the wall where Ste. Marie lay perdu, and he could see that her eyes had the same dark fire, the same tragic look of appeal that he had seen in them before--once in the Champs-Elysées and again in his dreams.

Abruptly he became aware that while he gazed, like a man in a trance, the two young people walked on their way and were on the point of passing beyond reach of eye or ear. He made a sudden involuntary movement as if he would call them back, and for the first time his faithful hiding-place, strained beyond silent endurance, betrayed him with a loud rustle of shaken branches. Ste. Marie shrank back, his heart in his throat. It was too late to retreat now down the tree. The damage was already done. He saw the two young people halt and turn to look, and after a moment he saw the boy come slowly forward, staring. He heard him say:

"What's up in that tree? There's something in the tree." And he heard the girl answer: "It's only birds fighting. Don't bother!" But young Arthur Benham came on, staring up curiously until he was almost under the high wall.

Then Ste. Marie's strange madness, or the hand of Fate, or whatever power it was which governed him on that day, thrust him on to the ultimate pitch of recklessness. He bent forward from his insecure perch over the wall until his head and shoulders were in plain sight, and he called down to the lad below in a loud whisper:

"Benham! Benham!"

The boy gave a sharp cry of alarm and began to back away. And after a moment Ste. Marie heard the cry echoed from Coira O'Hara. He heard her say:

"Be careful! Be careful, Arthur! Come away! Oh, come away quickly!"

Ste. Marie raised his own voice to a sort of cry. He said:

"Wait! I tell you to wait, Benham! I must have a word with you. I come from your family--from Helen!"

To his amazement the lad turned about and began to run toward where the girl stood waiting; and so, without a moment's hesitation, Ste. Marie threw himself across the top of the wall, hung for an instant by his hands, and dropped upon the soft turf. Scarcely waiting to recover his balance, he stumbled forward, shouting:

"Wait! I tell you, wait! Are you mad? Wait, I say! Listen to me!"

Vaguely, in the midst of his great excitement, he had heard a whistle sound as he dropped inside the wall. He did not know then whence the shrill call had come, but afterward he knew that Coira O' Hara had blown it. And now, as he ran forward toward the two who stood at a distance staring at him, he heard other steps and he slackened his pace to look.

A man came running down among the black-boled trees, a strange, squat, gnomelike man whose gait was as uncouth as his dwarfish figure. He held something in his two hands as he ran, and when he came near he threw this thing with a swift movement up before him, but he did not pause in his odd, scrambling run.

Ste. Marie felt a violent blow upon his left leg between hip and knee. He thought that somebody had crept up behind him and struck him; but as he whirled about he saw that there was no one there, and then he heard a noise and knew that the gnomelike running man had shot him. He faced about once more toward the two young people. He was very angry and he wished to say so, and very much he wished to explain why he had trespassed there, and why they had no right to shoot him as if he were some wretched thief. But he found that in some quite absurd fashion he was as if fixed to the ground. It was as if he had suddenly become of the most ponderous and incredible weight, like lead--or that other metal, not gold, which is the heaviest of all. Only the metal, seemingly, was not only heavy but fiery hot, and his strength was incapable of holding it up any longer. His eyes fixed themselves in a bewildered stare upon the figure of Mlle. Coira O'Hara; he had time to observe that she had put up her two hands over her face, then he fell down forward, his head struck something very hard, and he knew no more.

XV

A CONVERSATION AT LA LIERRE

Captain Stewart walked nervously up and down the small inner drawing-room at La Lierre, his restless hands fumbling together behind him, and his eyes turning every half-minute with a sharp eagerness to the closed door. But at last, as if he were very tired, he threw himself down in a chair which stood near one of the windows, and all his tense body seemed to relax in utter exhaustion. It was not a very comfortable chair that he had sat down in, but there were no comfortable chairs in the room--nor, for that matter, in all the house. When he had taken the place, about two months before this time, he had taken it furnished, but that does not mean very much in France. No French country-houses--or town-houses, either--are in the least comfortable, by Anglo-Saxon standards, and that is at least one excellent reason why Frenchmen spend just as little time in them as they possibly can. Half the cafés in Paris would promptly put up their shutters if Parisian homes could all at once turn themselves into something like English or American ones. As for La Lierre, it was even more dreary and bare and tomblike than other country-houses, because it was, after all, a sort of ruin, and had not been lived in for fifteen years, save by an ancient caretaker and his nearly as ancient wife. And that was, perhaps, why it could be taken on a short lease at such a very low price.

The room in which Captain Stewart sat was behind the large drawing-room, which was always kept closed now, and it looked out by one window to the west, and by two windows to the north, over a corner of the kitchen garden and a vista of trees beyond. It was a high-ceiled room with walls bare except for two large mirrors in the Empire fashion, which stared at each other across the way with dull and flaking eyes. Under each of these stood a heavy gilt and ebony console with a top of chocolate-colored marble, and in the centre of the room there was a table of a like fashion to the consoles. Further than this there was nothing save three chairs, upon one of which lay Captain Stewart's dust-coat and motoring cap and goggles.

A shaft of golden light from the low sun slanted into the place through the western window from which the Venetians had been pulled back, and fell across the face of the man who lay still and lax in his chair, eyes closed and chin dropped a little so that his mouth hung weakly open. He looked very ill, as, indeed, any one might look after such an attack as he had suffered on the night previous. That one long moment of deathly fear before he had fallen down in a fit had nearly killed him. All through this following day it had continued to recur until he thought he should go mad. And there was worse still. How much did Olga Nilssen know? And how much had she told? She had astonished and frightened him when she had said that she knew about the house on the road to Clamart, for he thought he had hidden his visits to La Lierre well. He wondered rather drearily how she had discovered them, and he wondered how much she knew more than she had admitted. He had a half-suspicion of something like the truth, that Mlle. Nilssen knew only of Coira O'Hara's presence here, and drew a rather natural inference. If that was all, there was no danger from her--no more, that is, than had already borne its fruit, for Stewart knew well enough that Ste. Marie must have learned of the place from her. In any case Olga Nilssen had left Paris--he had discovered that fact during the day--and so for the present she might be eliminated as a source of peril.

The man in the chair gave a little groan and rolled his head wearily to and fro against the uncomfortable chair-back, for now he came to the real and immediate danger, and he was so very tired and ill, and his head ached so sickeningly that it was almost beyond him to bring himself face to face with it.

There was the man who lay helpless upon a bed up-stairs! And there were the man's friends, who were not at all helpless or bedridden or in captivity!

A wave of almost intolerable pain swept through Stewart's aching head, and he gave another groan which was almost like a child's sob. But at just that moment the door which led into the central hall opened, and the Irishman O'Hara came into the room. Captain Stewart sprang to his feet to meet him, and he caught the other man by the arm in his eagerness.

"How is he?" he cried out. "How is he? How badly was he hurt?"

Jason: A Romance

JASON

A ROMANCE

BY

JUSTUS MILES FORMAN

AUTHOR OF

"A STUMBLING BLOCK" "BUCHANAN'S WIFE"

"THE ISLAND OF ENCHANTMENT"

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY

W. HATHERELL, R.I.

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

MCMIX

Copyright, 1908.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

I

STE. MARIE HEARS OF A MYSTERY AND MEETS A DARK LADY

II