CHAPTER VI

CONCERNING A CURSE, AND THE MANNER OF ITS GOING HOME TO ROOST

The room, furnished in dark walnut, was upholstered in red Utrecht velvet, the walls hung with a striped fawn-and-red paper. A mirror, in a florid gilt frame, was fixed above the low mantel-shelf. The atmosphere held odors reminiscent of cigarettes, patchouli, and food in process of cooking. The dinner-table had, by Adrian's orders, been placed near the central window, the two casements of which stood open to the ground. After so many hours spent in the open air, dining in present company he felt the necessity of such freshness as he could by any means get. In the center of the long flagged courtyard the big palmate leaves of a row of pollarded chestnuts caught the light coming from the offices on the left. White-coated, white-capped _chefs_ and scullions passed to and fro. An old liver-colored bitch, basset as to her legs and pointer as to her body, waddled after them, her nose in the air, sniffing, permanently hopeful of scraps. On the flags, just outside the salon window, three tabby kittens played--stalking one another round pots of fuchsia and musk, bouncing out, leaping in the air, spitting, galloping sideways, highly diabolic with teapot-handle tails. Farther along the courtyard, hidden by the lower branches of the intervening trees, a stable-helper sang and whistled as he washed down the hotel omnibus. The servants talked, laughed, scolded over their work. Almost incessantly from the _rue Jeanne d'Arc_ came the long-drawn rattle and swish of the electric trams. And opposite to Adrian at table, clad in a complete outfit of his, Adrian's clothes--a white flannel suit with a faint four-thread black stripe on it, a soft, pale blue shirt, an immaculate collar and narrow black tie--sat William Smyrthwaite, outwardly, at all events, surprisingly transformed.

Adrian had hesitated to propose him as an inmate; but an up-to-date motor-car, a ruffling chauffeur, a well-built suit-case and kit-bag bearing an English name, a very good Paris address, are calculated to promote not only faith, but charity. The hotel proprietor, a short, fat, bland little man with a dancing step and a shrewd, rapacious Norman eye, was sympathy itself.

"That Monsieur should remove his effects and seek another, an inferior, hotel would desolate him, was not to be thought of! He would arrange the affair on the instant. Such lamentable lapses will occur at times--are there not, alas, members of the most respectable, the most distinguished, families who turn badly? Let Monsieur, then, rest assured he was infinitely touched by the confidence Monsieur reposed in him. And, see"--tapping his forehead with a fat forefinger--"the little suite at the back on the ground floor, giving upon the courtyard, became precisely this morning vacant. True, these were not the rooms he should have selected for Monsieur's occupation; but, under the circumstances, it was conceivable they would serve. They were comfortable though modest. They were retired--two bed-chambers connected by a salon. There Monsieur and his guest could dine in private, secure from the intrusive observation of strangers. But, indeed, no--Monsieur was too amiable! He himself was undeserving of thanks, since did it not become evident that Monsieur was engaged in a work of the highest benevolence--the attempted reclamation of an unhappy fellow-creature?--With which work to be associated, even in the humblest capacity, could not but be esteemed by any person of feeling as a privilege."

Then with a rapid change of manner, becoming autocratic, Napoleonic:

"Gustave," he cried, over his shoulder, "_portez les bagages de ces messieurs aux numeros sept et huit._"--And waving Adrian to follow, he bounced lightly away down the corridor; his eyebrows drawn together as he inwardly debated how many francs extra he dared charge for the Utrecht-velvet upholstered suite without seeming too flagrantly extortionate.

After that first outbreak of unseemly rejoicing at the announcement of his father's death, young Smyrthwaite subsided into a state of acquiescent apathy. He did as he was bid, but with what mental reservations, what underlying thoughts or emotions, Adrian failed to discover. Somewhere, in this weak, slipshod creature, he suspected a bed-rock of obstinacy. He also suspected predatory instincts. Or, was it only that the instinct of self-preservation had taken--as under the stress of poverty it almost must take--a predatory form?

At the beginning of dinner Smyrthwaite spoke little, but sat, his elbows upon the table, his head bent low over his plate, putting away food with the sullen haste of an animal suspicious of its fellow-animal's intentions and appetite. And when Adrian, to whom this exhibition of gluttony proved anything but agreeable, hinted civilly there was no cause for hurry, he looked across the nicely ordered table with a half-sneering yet oddly boyish smile.

"Oh! it's all very well for you," he said. "You're safe enough to have your solid three meals to-morrow, and all the other blooming to-morrows as long as you live. But, I tell you, I mean to make jolly sure of this meal while I can get it. I've learned not to put much trust in to-morrows. I want to be on the safe side, so that if the wind changes, as far as this meal goes, anyhow, I shall have nothing to repent of."

"But, my good fellow, the wind will not change. That is exactly what I have been trying to assure you," Adrian interposed, pity and repulsion playing see-saw within him to a bewildering extent. "For the future you can be just as secure of three meals a day as I myself am if you choose."

"Bully!" Smyrthwaite said. "I wonder! The old man cut up well?" he added, his face again bent down over the table.

"Your father left a large fortune," Adrian replied, repulsion now very much on the top.

"To me? Not likely!"

"To your sisters. And Joanna"--Adrian hesitated, conscious of a singular distaste to using the Christian name--"at once devoted a considerable sum of money to be employed, in the event of your return, for your maintenance."

With his coarse, thick-jointed fingers Smyrthwaite rubbed a bit of bread round his plate, sopping up the remains of the gravy.

"That's no more than right," he said, "if you come to think of it. Why should the girls have all the stuff?"

His hand went out furtively across the table to a dish of braised beef and richly cooked vegetables which he proceeded to transfer to his own plate.

"All the same, it's nice of Nannie. We were rather chummy in the old days--the blasted old days which I've nearly forgot. But I didn't suppose she cared still. Poor old Nannie! What a beastly hash my father made of our lives! Nannie ought to have married Merriman. Then I should have had a home. Andrew's a bit peachy, but he's a rare good sort."

He slushed in the food silently for a while; and Adrian, anxious to avoid observation of the details of that process, watched the kittens sporting round the flower-pots on the flags just outside.

He had searched for Bibby, spending time, money, even risking personal safety, in that search. He had found Bibby. He had brought him here to civilized quarters. He had clothed him from head to foot.--Adrian felt a pang, for they were such nice clothes! He was rather fond of that particular flannel suit. Really it cost him not a little to part with it; and, he could almost fancy, hanging now upon Bibby's angular, narrow-chested frame, that it bore the plaintive air of a thing unkindly treated, consciously humiliated and disgraced. He apologized to it half sentimentally, half humorously, in spirit.--And then because the small things of life whip one's sense of the great ones into higher

## activity, the trivial matter of the ill-used flannel suit brought home

to Adrian with disquieting clearness the difficulties of this whole third _affaire_ Smyrthwaite in which he had, as it now occurred to him, rather recklessly embarked.

As if the two first _affaires_, those of father and daughter, hadn't been enough, he must needs go and add that of the degenerate son and brother! And who, after all, would thank him? Wasn't he very much a fool, then, for his pains? Psychologically and in the abstract, as an example of lapse and degradation, Smyrthwaite presented an interesting and instructive study. But in the concrete, as a guest, a companion, as a young man, a relation, moreover, to be reclaimed from evil courses and socially reinstated, the situation took on quite other color. Looking across the table now as, his plate again empty, Bibby sank back in his chair, slouched together, his hands in his trousers pockets, his blue eyes turned upon the door, anxiously awaiting the advent of the _garçon_ with the next course, Adrian was tempted to deplore his own philanthropic impulse. All hope of pulling the boy up to any permanently decent level of living seemed so unspeakably remote.

And, as though some silent transmission of thought had taken place between them, Bibby's next speech went to confirm Adrian's fears.

"You say if I choose," he began; "but the question is, can I choose? You see I'm so beastly out of the habit of all that.--Now I'm getting full I seem to understand things, so I'd best talk at once."

"I ask nothing better than that you should talk," Adrian put in, good-temperedly. For Heaven's sake, let him at least gain whatever scientific knowledge of and from Bibby he could!

"Presently I shall turn sleepy," the other continued, with a curiously unblushing directness of statement. "I always do when I'm first filled up after going short. You see, I've never set eyes on you before, and you come along and tell me some blooming fairy story about poor old Nannie and her money. It may be true or it may be false, but anyhow I don't seem to tumble to it. I fancy these clothes and I fancy this feed, but I don't feel to go much beyond that.--Chicken?--Yes, rather. Leave me the breast. Golly! I do like white meat! Two or three years ago it would have set me on fire. I should have felt like bucking up and making play with it--repentant prodigal, don't you know, and all that kind of rot. But now I don't seem to be able to bother much. If it was winter I suppose I should be more ready to fix on to it, because I'm afraid of the cold. When you're empty half the time cold makes you so beastly sick; and then I get chilblains and my skin chaps. But in the summer I'd just as soon lie out.--Say, can I have the rest of the fowl?"

"By all means," Adrian replied, handing him the dish.

"You see, it's like this," he went on, picking up the bones and ripping off the meat with his teeth, "I've knocked about so long it's grown second nature. I have to move on. I can't stick to one job or stop in one place. I suppose that's left over from the old days, when my father was always down on me with some infernal row or other. He hated me like poison. It's a trick Englishmen have with their sons. They've not got the knack of paternity like you French. I got into the habit of feeling I'd best run because he was sure to be after me; and that's a sort of feeling you can't be quit of. It keeps you always looking over your shoulder to see what's coming next. People haven't been half nasty to me on the whole, and I mightn't have done so badly if I could have stuck. A little mincing devil of an artist, with a head like the dome of St. Paul's--draws for the comic papers--you may know him--René Dax--"

"Yes, I know him," Adrian said.

"He picked me up this winter when I was just pitching myself into the river. It was cold, you see, and I'd been drinking. It's silly to drink when you're empty. It gives you the hump. He took me home with him, and drew funny pictures of me. They were pretty low down some of them, but they made me laugh. He did me very well as to food and all that, but two or three days of it was enough. I couldn't stand the confinement. I pinched what I could and left."

Adrian raised his eyebrows and passed his hand down over his black beard meditatively. A sweet youth, a really sweet and promising youth this!--René had never mentioned the thieving incident to him, and it explained much. It also showed René's conception of the duty entailed by hospitality in an admirable light. Even active exercise of the predatory instinct must be passed over in silence in the case of a guest.

"What he paid me, with what I took, kept me going quite a good while," Smyrthwaite said, stretching and yawning audibly. "But I'm turning thundering sleepy. I told you I should. I'll be shot if I can sit up on end jawing any more like this," he added querulously. "You might let a fellow have ten minutes' nap."

Ten minutes, twenty minutes, all the minutes of the unnumbered ages spent by Bibby in slumber would, Adrian just then felt, supply a more than grateful respite! He lit a cigarette and stepped out of the open window on to the flags, thereby startling the tabby kittens, who, with arched backs and frenzied spittings, vanished behind the flower-pots. An arc lamp was fixed to the wall just over the kitchen entrance. One of the white-clad _chefs_ brought out a chair, and sat there reading a flimsy, little two-page evening paper. The heavy foliage of the chestnuts hung motionless. In the distance a bugle sounded to quarters. And Adrian thought of Gabrielle St. Leger, standing on the grass-grown monticle looking across the gleaming sands of Ste. Marie into the beckoning future. When next they met he would speak, she would answer--and Adrian's eyes grew at once very gay and very gentle. He pushed up the ends of his mustache and smoothed the tip of his pointed beard. Then he remembered on a sudden that in the houroosh over the finding of Bibby he had forgotten all about his letters.

So he took them out of his pocket and looked at them. It wasn't necessary to read dear Anastasia's letter now, since he knew pretty well what it must contain, having seen her so lately. But here was Joanna's black-edged envelope. He shrugged his shoulders.--Oh! this interminable _famille_ Smyrthwaite! Why, the dickens, had his great-aunt committed the maddening error of marrying into it? With an expressive grimace, followed by an expression of saintly resignation, Adrian tore the envelope open. The letter was a long one, worse luck! He read a few lines, and moved forward to where the arc lamp gave a fuller light. "_Par exemple!_" he said, once or twice; also, very softly, "_Sapristi!_" drawing in his breath. Then all lurking sense of comedy deserted him. He straightened himself up, his face bleaching beneath its brown coating of sunburn and his eyes growing hot. The old dog waddled across from the offices and planted herself in front of him, wagging a disgracefully illegitimate tail, looking up in his face, sniffing and feebly grinning. He paid no heed to her feminine cajoleries; paid no heed to the fact that his cigarette had gone out, or to the antics of the again emergent kittens, or to the intermittent sounds from the courtyard and city, or to the all-pervasive stable and kitchen smells.

"Dear Cousin Adrian," Joanna's letter ran, "I find it difficult and even painful to write to you, yet I can no longer refrain from writing. In refraining I might be guilty of an injustice toward you. This nerves me to write. I have suffered very greatly in the past week. I know suffering may purify, but I am not purified by this suffering. On the contrary, the tendencies of my nature which I least approve are brought into prominence by it. I owe it to whatever is best in me; I owe it to you--yes, above all to you--to take steps to check this dreadful florescence of evil in myself.

"But before explaining the principal cause of my suffering, I must tell you this. You may have heard from Margaret. In that case forgive my repeating what you already know. She has engaged herself to Mr. Challoner. The news came to me as a great shock. From every point of view such a marriage is displeasing to me. I have regretted Mr. Challoner's influence over Margaret. Already I cannot but see she is deteriorating, and adopting a view of life dreadfully wanting in elevation of feeling and thought. I know you will sympathize with me in this, and that you will also deplore Margaret's choice. Indeed, the thought of the effect that this news must have upon your mind has caused me much sorrow. You may so reasonably object to Mr. Challoner entering our family. I have never considered that he appreciated your great superiority to himself both in position and in attainments, or treated you with the deference due to you. Mr. Challoner is not a gentleman, and I am humiliated by the prospect of his becoming nearly connected with you by marriage. You are too just to visit this upon me; but it must color your thought of me and of all our future relation.

"I speak of our future relation; and there the agony of suspense in which I have lately lived overcomes me. I can hardly write. Believe me, Adrian, I do not doubt you; I know you are incapable of an inconsiderate, still more of a cruel, action. My trust in you is as deep as my affection. It is myself whom I distrust. Knowing my absence of talent and beauty, knowing my own faults of character from the first, the wonder of your love for me has been almost overpowering, almost incredible."

Adrian folded the thin sheets together and walked back and forth over the flags, looking up at the fair night sky above the big-leaved chestnuts.

"My God! Poor thing! poor Joanna! What can one do? Poor thing!" he said.

Then he stood still again in the lamplight and re-opened the letter.

"And hence, when gossiping reports reach me, however contrary to my knowledge of you and however unworthy of credence they may be, aware as I am of my many shortcomings, they torture me. I cannot control my mind. It places dreadful ideas before me. I realize my utter dependence upon you for all that makes life desirable--I could almost say for all that makes its continuance possible. Before you came to us, at the time of papa's death this winter, I was unhappy, but passively unhappy, as one born blind might be yearning for a sense denied and unknown to him. Now, when fears regarding our relation to each other assail me I am like one who, having enjoyed the rapture and glory of sight, is struck blind, or who learns that sightlessness, absolute and incurable, awaits him. A horror of great darkness is upon me. Only you can relieve me of that horror; therefore I write to you.

"Col. Rentoul Haig tells Margaret he heard from acquaintances of yours in Paris this summer that you have long been attached to a lady there who would in every respect be a suitable wife for you. I know that this cannot be true. Indeed, I know it. But I implore you to tell me _yourself_ that it is not true. Set my mind at rest. The limits of my endurance are reached. Misery is undermining my health, as well as all the nobler elements of my character. I am a prey to insomnia, and to obtain sleep I am obliged to have recourse to drugs. I grow afraid of my own impulses. Dear Adrian, write to me. Forgive me. Comfort me. Reassure me. Yours,

"JOANNA SMYRTHWAITE."

Adrian folded up the letter slowly, returned it to his pocket, and stood thinking.

Thanks to his strong dramatic sense, at first the thing in itself, the isolating intensity of Joanna's passion, filled his imagination. Every word was sincere, dragged live and bleeding out of her heart. Baldness of statement only made it the more telling. This was what she actually believed regarding herself, what she really felt and meant.--"The limits of my endurance are reached, I suffer too much, I grow afraid of my own impulses." This was not a way of talking, rhetoric, a pose; it was reasoned and accurate fact. And, if he understood Joanna aright, her capacity of suffering was enormous. If the limit of endurance had now been reached, about all which lay short of that limit it was terrible to think! She had been tortured, and only in the extremity of torture did she cry for help.

But here Adrian's dramatic sense gave before the common instinct of humanity. The most callous of men might very well be moved by Joanna's letter; and Adrian was among the least callous of men, especially where a woman was concerned. Therefore, for him, practically, what followed? This question struck him as quite the ugliest he had ever been called upon to answer in the whole course of his life. To use poor Joanna's favorite catch-word, a "dreadful" question--a very dreadful question, as he saw it just now, taking the warmth out of the sunshine and the color out of life. He recalled those extremely disagreeable ten minutes, spent among the sweet-scented allspice bushes, in the garden of the Tower House. He had argued out the question, or the equivalent of the question, then--and, as he had believed, answered it fully and finally, once and for all. But apparently he hadn't answered it finally, since on its recurring now the consequences of either alternative presented themselves to him with such merciless distinctness.--The fact that his conscience was clear in respect of Joanna, that she was the victim of self-invented delusion--in as far as reciprocal affection on his part went--made little appreciable difference to the situation. Indeed, to prove his own innocence was merely to cap the climax of her humiliation with conviction of presumptuous folly.

Indescribably perplexed and pained, shocked by the position in which he found himself, Adrian passed absently back from the courtyard into the salon. He had forgotten the third _affaire_ Smyrthwaite in the storm and stress of the second. Here, the third _affaire_ presented itself to him under a guise far from encouraging.

Bibby, the whiteness of the flannel suit bringing out his limp, slatternly yet boyish figure into high relief as against the red Utrecht velvet, lay crumpled sideways in the largest of the chairs. His legs dangled over one arm of it, his head nodded forward, sunk between his pointed shoulders, his chin rested on his breast. An ill-conditioned, hopeless, irreclaimable fellow! Yet still the family likeness to Joanna remained--to the degraded Joanna of the "funny pictures" upon René Dax's studio wall--a Joanna wearing his, Adrian's, clothes, moreover, whose mouth hung open as he breathed stertorously in almost bestial after-dinner sleep.

Adrian looked once, picked up his hat, and fled.

For the ensuing three or four hours he walked aimlessly up and down the streets of Rouen, along the pleasant tree-planted boulevards and the quays beside the broad, silent-flowing Seine. He was aware of lights, of blottings of black shadow, of venerable buildings rich in beautiful detail, of the brightly lighted interiors of wine-shops and cafes open to the pavement, of people loud-voiced and insistent, and of vehicles--these in lessening number as it drew toward midnight--passing by. But all his impressions were indefinite, his vision strangely blurred. He walked, as a living man might walk through a phantom city peopled by chaffering ghosts, for all that his surroundings meant to him, his thoughts concentrated upon the overwhelming personal drama, and personal question, raised by Joanna's letter.

Must he, taking his courage rather brutally in both hands, disillusion her and risk the results of such disillusionment? Chivalry, pity, humanity, the very honor of his manhood, protested as against some dastardly and unpardonable act of physical cruelty. How he wished she hadn't employed that illustration of blindness and sight! The thought of her pale eyes fixed on him, doting, imploring, worshiping, hungry with unsatisfied passion, starving for his love, pursued him, making itself almost visible to his outward sense. How was it possible to sear those poor eyes, extinguishing light in them forever by application of the white-hot iron of truth? Before God, he could not do it! It was too horrible.

And yet, the alternative--to lie to her, to lie to love, to be false to himself, to be false to the hope and purpose of years, didn't his manhood, every mental, and moral, and--very keenly--every physical fiber of him protest equally against that? He saw Gabrielle as he had seen her only this afternoon, in her fresh, grave beauty, the promise of hidden delights, of enchanting discoveries in her mysterious smile. Saw, as he so happily believed, a certain awakening of her heart and sense toward the joys which man has with woman and woman with man. How could he consent to cut himself from all this and take Joanna's meager and unlovely body in his arms? It wasn't to be done. He turned faint with loathing and unspeakable distress, staggered as though drunk, nearly fell.

Bibby Smyrthwaite and Joseph Challoner for brothers, Margaret Smyrthwaite for sister, Joanna for bride--this, all which went along with it and which of necessity it implied, was more than he could face. He would rather be dead, rather ten thousand times. He said so in perfect honesty, knowing that were the final choice offered him now and here, notwithstanding his immense value of life and joy in living he would choose to die.

But in point of fact no such choice was offered him, since in his opinion it is the act of a most contemptible poltroon to avoid the issue by means of self-inflicted death. No, he must take the consequences of his own actions, and poor Joanna must take the consequences of her own actions--in obedience to the fundamental natural and moral law which none escape. And among those consequences, both of her and of his own past actions, was the cruel suffering which he found himself constrained to inflict. He shrank, he sickened, for to be cruel was hateful to him, a violation of his nature. In a sort of despair he went back upon the whole question, arguing it through once more, wearily, painfully, point by point.

Adrian's aimless wanderings had, now, conducted him to a small public garden laid out with flower borders, shrubberies, and carefully tended islands of turf, beneath the shadow of a chaste yet florid fifteenth-century church. Clerestory windows glinted high above, touched by the lamplight, and flying buttresses, thick with fantastic carven flowers and little lurking demons, formed a lace-work of stone against the sky. He sat down on one of the garden benches, laying his hat beside him on the seat. He doubled himself together, his elbows upon his knees, pressing his hands against either side of his head.

He was very tired. He was also desperately sad. Never before had he felt the chill breath of a trouble from which there seemed no issue save by the creation of further, deeper trouble. Never before had he--so it now appeared to him--gauged the possibilities of tragedy in human life. And the present situation had grown out of such wholly accidental happenings--well-meant kindnesses and courtesies, an overstrained delicacy in admitting the reality of poor Joanna's infatuation and making her understand that his affections were engaged elsewhere. In his fear of assuming too much and appearing fatuous, he had let things drift. He had been guilty of saying that fatal word "too little" against which dear Anastasia Beauchamp to-day fulminated. There he was to blame. There was his real error, his real mistake. It gnawed mercilessly at his conscience and his sensibility. It would continue so to gnaw, whatever the upshot of this disastrous business, as long as he lived. In the restrained and conventional intercourse of modern, civilized life, the difficulty of avoiding that fatal word "too little" is so constant and so great. His mind, spent with thought and emotion, dwelt with languid persistence upon this point. In this

## particular he had shirked his duty both to Joanna and to himself, with

the terrible result that he was doomed to inflict a cruel injury upon her or to wreck his own life.

And at that moment, dully, without any quickening of interest, amiable or the reverse, he perceived that a young woman sat at the farther end of the bench. When he came to think of it, he believed she had followed him through the streets for some little time. Now she coughed slightly and moved rather nearer to him, fidgeted, pushing about the loose, shingly gravel, which made small rattling noises, with her foot. Adrian still sat doubled together pressing his hands against either side of his head. Presently she began to speak, making overtures to him, praising his handsome looks, his youth his dress, his bearing, his walk, flattering and wheedling him after the manner of her sorry kind. While expressing admiration and offering endearing phrases, her voice remained toneless and monotonous. And this peculiarity rather than what she said aroused Adrian's attention. He looked round and received a definite impression, notwithstanding the dimness of the light. Her reddish hair was turned loosely back from her forehead. Her face was gaunt and worn under its layer of fard. Her mouth was large, and the painted lips, though coarse, were sensitive--her soul had not yet been killed by her infamous trade. Her eyes were pale, desperate with shame and with entreaty. And these were the eyes which, if he would save all which made life noble and dear to him, Adrian must strike blind!

During some few seconds he looked straight at her. Then, feeling among the loose coins in his pocket, he found a gold twenty-franc piece and put it into her hand.

"It is no use," he said gravely and very sadly--speaking whether to her or to Joanna Smyrthwaite he could not tell. "I do not want you. My poor woman, I do not want you. It is not possible that I ever should want you. I am bitterly grieved for you, but you waste your time."

And he rose and moved away, having suddenly regained full possession of himself. He had ceased to doubt in respect of Joanna. That passing of money was to him symbolic, setting him free. He understood that to marry Joanna would be a crime against God-given instinct, against God-given love, against the God-given beauty of all wholesome and natural things. The sour, pedantic, man-imagined deity of some Protestant sect might demand such hideous, almost blasphemous sacrifice from its votaries; but never that supreme artist, Almighty God the Creator, maker of man's flesh as well as of his spirit, _le bon Dieu_ of the divinely reasonable and divinely human Catholic Church. To marry Joanna would, in the end, constitute a blacker cruelty than to tell her the whole truth. For he couldn't live up to that lie and keep it going. He would hate her, and sooner or later show that he hated her; he would inevitably be unfaithful to her and leave her, thereby ruining her life as well as his own.

He went back to the hotel. The little red Utrecht-velvet upholstered _salon_ still smelled of cooking, patchouli, and cigarettes, plus the dregs of a tumbler of brandy and soda and a something human and insufficiently washed. Smyrthwaite's door was shut, and no sound proceeded from behind it, for which Adrian returned thanks and betook himself to bed. He was dog-tired. He slept till broad day. On making a morning reconnaissance he found Smyrthwaite's door still locked, nor did knocking elicit any response. Somewhat anxious, he went out into the courtyard. The window was ajar, the room vacant, the bed undisturbed. Then he remembered to have seen a tall, slight, loosely made figure, wearing whitish garments, flitting hastily away down a dim side-street as he turned into the _rue Jeanne d'Arc_ on his way home. Later Adrian discovered that a pair of diamond and enamel sleeve-links, a set of pearl studs, some loose gold and a hundred-franc note were missing from his suit-case, of which the fastening had been forced.

True to his predatory and roving instincts, Bibby had "pinched" what he could and left.

##