CHAPTER XI.

THE CHAMBER-WINDOW.

At that very time Shan Healy was speeding on a bicycle (having missed a train) from Paris to Versailles, with perspiration raining over his face and swear-words vented when racing through those villages paved with old pavers, which mercilessly jerked him. It was not until six o’clock that he got to Versailles and the Villa des Medicis there, a house of the Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard, where, having scorched down to the house-front through a great avenue of yews, he craved to interview Miss Ruth Vickery.

He was taken to the door of a chamber in the middle of which stood three ladies talking warmly, though in low tones—two elderly ladies and Miss Ruth Vickery; and a whirl of words was being uttered among them, sometimes all the three trying to make their opinions heard at once, all looking as exhausted and haggard as if they had been going on all the day long, while in the gloom of a far corner of the room lay Miss Eve Vickery asleep, with an appearance of exhaustion, even of swoon. Shan Healy stood on the threshold, and he could just hear the Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard, whom he knew very well, cry with a casting up of her hands and eyes, “Ah, my dear Lina, you can persuade an angel or the good God himself to change their mind, but you cannot persuade a saint who is English too.”

This lady, although English herself, spoke English in quite a halt way, with effort, was tall and fair, resembling Miss Eve, her niece, in stand and being.

“But, Aunt,” wooed Miss Ruth, “bear with me, since I do mean well, as in my God’s sight. Ask yourself—how can I, how could I, try to induce Eve to marry a man who, it appears, is without even morality, whose mood is pagan, whose aim is Cæsarian, whose God is arrogance?... And Eve never would, I think, if I know her! You have heard her say yourself——”

“Ah, then, why in the good God’s name did the girl go and kiss him with all Paris gazing at it?” exclaimed the Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard.

“Aunt,” breathed Miss Ruth, all ruby-red, with drooped lids, “you know that Eve did not—‘kiss’— him; he—‘kissed’—her.”

“Ah, my good Ruth,” observed the third lady, one Madame Lina Grammont, “the world does not draw these exquisite distinctions, believe me: it knows that in a kiss it is generally the gentleman who both begins against the lady’s will and ends against her will.”

“Exactly,” remarked the Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard; “but then, we all know our English: it is always their little mannerism to regard the lady as made of anything but of flesh and blood. The fact, however, that stares one in the face is that Eve is now bound to be married immediately; and I repeat that the scandal will be less if of the two gentlemen she chooses the one who has kissed her.”

“Truly, the scandal will be less,” Miss Ruth answered; “and you do not say, if you think it, that the worldly grandeurs will be greater; but, happily for her peace, Aunt, Eve would rather choose, I think, to live in a hovel with a Christian gentleman like the Comte de Courcy than with one whose bosom was never vaccinated with the stigmata of compassion and abnegation, though he were five times a Mogul.”

“So I hear you say, my dear,” replied the countess, “though Eve herself no doubt most accurately knows her own secret; but if it be a fact that her stomach is such as to like the Comte de Courcy better, why will she not send for him, since he is every hour expecting her reply?”

“She will send, I think,” replied Miss Ruth. “What, however, was the use of summoning papa from London unless she is to hold out for his presence before pronouncing her decision? He should by now have arrived in Paris, and within an hour will be in Versailles; then, I think, she will speak, she will send, for she feels, I am sure, the nobleness of Monsieur de Courcy’s renewed offer, and will not, I think, grieve him by any longer——”

But at that moment Healy at the door sneezed, and, the ladies noticing him, two of them, still speaking eagerly together, went away through another door, Miss Ruth going to meet Healy. She was just beginning to say, “I am so glad——” when Healy put his lips to her ear with “Not in here, miss! every word breathed in here all day has been heard in the palace at Paris”—whereon he showed her the telephone over the sofa on which Miss Eve lay asleep, whispering deeply afresh, “He’s this minute lying on his face, hearing her very breathing, I believe”; and when Miss Ruth, as they now moved out of the room into a vestibule, asked how that was possible, Healy replied that it was by means of a whispering-gallery, as at St. Paul’s in London, where anyone stationed at the part of a circular wall farthest from a telephone in the wall heard greatly augmented any sounds thrown out of the telephone-mouth, being in a focus of the sound-waves. “The telephone-number of that gallery has been plugged on to yours the whole day, miss,” Healy said, “someone here is in his pay, and he has been lying on the ground in the gallery with a crowd of tools strewn round about, modelling something and listening, smiling with himself the while. I know that he knows at what moment your papa was summoned to you, and at what moment Mr. de Courcy’s proposal reached here; so, as soon as I could slip away when he went out, I made paces to answer your letter in person, so as to impress upon you that he is really in earnest in this, miss: for he has lost time and given up other things to see to this, seeing that he had arranged to go to the Chamber to-night, but isn’t going any more; so he is serious, miss, oh, he means business, believe me, miss, in this, and it will be a bitter pity if Miss Eve isn’t whipped off secretly this hour right out of his way somehow, though, as his spies are all about——”

“You do not believe, Healy, I see, that such a union could be good?” said Miss Ruth, her gaze on his face.

“Well, to be frank, no, miss, marriage wouldn’t hardly suit him,” said the voluble Healy. “No, no; he’d be that miserable, you wouldn’t believe; and the fonder he was of the lady, the more he’d hate and hiss at her for making him waste time. Time’s his wife; the clock, the clock, miss. Believe me, only to be near him, people feel in a prickly heat themselves, as if they were breathing fever from some fierce atmosphere—the very Orientals in the palace, miss, only that slothful old story-teller, Nundcumar.... No, no, miss, do now, he’ll be that miserable——”

“And his lady, too, I think, Healy?” suggested Miss Ruth, with her smile.

“Well, and the lady, too, now you mention it, miss,” Healy agreed; “true enough—the lady too; she’d be like a dog tied behind a railway train, couldn’t keep up the pace anyhow; try now, miss, try, try; he’ll be that wretched, you wouldn’t believe, and everything’ll be changed, and instead of me it’ll be the lady may be, and I nowhere with him; try, try. From that night in the forest round the ruined town of Anuradhapura, he has been good friends with me—till two days ago when the doctor came to France. I have told you about that night before, miss. Oh, that’s a forest, if you like, boundless, miss, I can tell you, and the men and brutes of that country move about in a brown, brown day, miss—big black brutes looming upon you out of the gloom with their stupid gazing, and thousands upon thousands of gods and ogres of stone broken to bits in those groves a thousand centuries ago, they say. He left me one nightfall at the top of one of the big dagabas to go all by himself into the dark of the timber, I to watch each nightfall there till he should come back with the piece of a stele; and there on the dagaba I watched and waited fifteen weeks, miss, night by night, till I began to fancy that he was gone for good. Eh, but he did come back to me all right, miss, one darksome night, under the large stars which look upon those parts, almost starved and stark naked he was, bearing forty old stone boxes on top of a buffalo-cart; and in his hand was that little gold thing made in the shape of a pear which he never lets go of, and even in his sleep keeps with him.... Do you know what’s in that little thing, miss? A little key, they say; and that old story-teller, Nundcumar, who fancies he knows everything, says that this little key opens a certain casket in which there’s a second key; and that second key opens a certain safe in which there’s a third key; and that third key opens a certain turret at Serapis, the Brittany palace, in which there’s a fourth key; and that fourth key opens a certain chamber in which there’s a fifth key; and that fifth key—I can’t quite call to mind what the fifth key opens; any way, it goes on till you get to the twelfth key, which opens the room in which all his jewels and riches are strewn—so says that Nundcumar, miss, and whereabouts under the ground that room may be no human being has yet got scent of, though that Nundcumar swears that _he_ knows where; and the key to the whole is within that little gold thing made in the shape of a pear which he never lets go of, miss.”

At this Miss Vickery, with her stare of child-wonder, stared at Healy, muttering, “How very much lighter and kinder would he feel, now, if he had no keys, nor any jewels to lay up for himself!”

“Doubtless, miss,” said the other; “but that’s how it stands—what would you have? What was I saying? Oh, about that night in the forest round about the ruined town of Anuradhapura; yes, that’s a forest, miss, if you like—boundless; but I think I’ve told you about that night before, miss, often; and from that night he has been good friends with me, till two days ago, when the doctor came——”

“Does he still avoid a meeting with his father?” asked Miss Vickery in a voice of secrecy.

“Rather, miss; his treatment of that old man is so shocking——” Healy commenced to answer, but was checked by a “_sh-h-h_” breathed by Miss Ruth, who through the doorway had noticed Miss Eve moving in her sleep; and they two stood peeping at the unfolding of Miss Eve’s eyes, saw Miss Eve notice a Bible which lay open by her nose on the sofa-cushion—a Bible which had been placed there by Miss Ruth with one phrase in it underlined in blue—saw her take the Book to gloat closely over the phrase in the gloaming’s dusk, saw her laugh, and, after laughing, suddenly press her lips upon the phrase with ravishment, to drop suddenly afresh on the cushion with a covering up of the face; the phrase which she had read and kissed being this, “Be ye not unequally yoked with unbelievers.”

“Steal softly in,” breathed Miss Ruth to Healy; and softly she herself, having moved into the room, stole on tip-toe quite to the telephone, the opening of which she shut off and stuffed up, Miss Eve meanwhile seeming still asleep; and to Healy Miss Ruth now said aloud, “Continue now, Healy, to speak of your master’s treatment of his poor father.”

Healy looked at her, and, discerning her meaning, whispered to himself, “Why, if she isn’t as wise as a serpent!”

“No, miss,” he added aloud, “he won’t see the doctor not on no account: never once seen him willingly since the day he left the island in your yacht; flies him like death, he does. Fact is, he is nervous of the doctor; nothing on earth below, nor in heaven above, is he nervous of, but of the doctor he is. Can’t get over his youth, you see, can’t get over all those years in which he used to believe the doctor a god, not a human being—shuns him as death, he does. And partly it’s the doctor’s own fault, I must say, for that’s only the truth, you know, miss, seeing that the doctor is going all dead against him, taking part with his political enemies, and he well aware of it, for there’s an eye spying for him behind every blind, so to say; and he’s afraid of the doctor, oh, he’s afraid, miss, that the doctor’s big brains may be digging his grave for him. So that’s his excuse, look; but still, when all’s said, his conduct to the doctor has been just shocking—shocking it has. Again and again has the old soul’s nose pressed against his gates, and begged and prayed to be let in, but no go; and that time at Lyons when the old man tried to spring into the carriage, just as Master Hanni stepped down out of the town-hall, that was a bit beyond: for as the father made to spring in, the son darted to the reins, the horses pranced and started off, leaving a father prostrate and bleeding on the street—oh no, that was a bit beyond, that was.”

Miss Vickery, with her face averted from the narrator, held her eyes bent skyward with a steadfast gaze, begging for God’s forgiveness of men; but from Miss Eve, who must have heard, who was meant to hear, neither word was uttered, nor a stir seen.

After a silence the talkative Healy proceeded to remark, “Well, I can understand him, miss. I recollect that when I was a little lad ten years of age, one day a great big girl of thirteen meets me in a lane, miss, and begins to kiss and hug me—couldn’t make out anyhow what it was about, so I got pretty scared, I did, and from that day for years, if I but spied that lass a league off, my hair’d go creepy, I’d take to my heels like a long-dog, and I do believe if I caught sight of her even now, I’d be bound to do a dart for it. It’s the same with Master Hanni—shy, shy; the doctor’s a great big bogey to him—thinks the doctor’ll be digging his grave, though he knows that the doctor can’t. And who suffers for it, miss? _I_ do. Thinks I am secretly on the doctor’s side against him, can’t believe I’m on his side against all comers, thinks I’m always going to ‘betray’ him to the doctor, trusts no one, trusts no one, it’s hard, because——”

Now, however, that stream of Healy’s speech was checked by the appearance in the doorway of a gentleman neatly dressed in grey, with a grey top-hat on his head, a neat umbrella, and side-whiskers, with him being the Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard and Madame Grammont; and Healy, seeing him, murmured, “Your pa, miss,” and now bowed himself out; while Mr. Vickery, darting his eyes all about the room, and discerning in the gloom his younger girl on the couch, rushed by Miss Ruth without any greeting, his eyes brimming with tears, his mouth trembling, and on his knees garnering Miss Eve in his arms, gave way now to weeping, again and again darting down his lips at her mouth, with pausings to gaze at her face, then again darting down at her mouth, with mania.

Miss Eve sat up, breathing “papa,” and laughed a little, casting back some hairs from her brow with a gesture which, undoubtedly, was not without something of hectic and hare-brained. Indeed, she appeared that day to be dwelling in a region so infected with fever, that through the day she had been treated as a patient, and on the sick list.

“Well, here I am,” Mr. Vickery said to her, “just arrived by God’s help—in time, I hope.... Got a headache, have you? my soul? my love?”

Miss Eve smiled triumphantly in her parent’s face, replying, “No, papa; why should I?”

“That’s all right, don’t say a word,” muttered the father, fast patting her arm, “don’t say a word.... Well, here I am, you see; arrived, arrived, by God’s help. And—I have telegraphed to Monsieur de Courcy to come. Have I done well? I thought I would, and—I did. All the way from London to Paris I was praying to be guided, and the moment I got to Paris the thought was given me to telegraph at once to Monsieur de Courcy, and—I did.”

“Did you, papa?” asked Miss Eve, smiling with her father.

“Yes. Eve, have I done well?”

“Why, papa, I think so,” replied Miss Eve, smiling that defiance which is amused, that triumph which is secure. “Monsieur de Courcy is a most estimable man.”

“He is; but still, Eve, tell me, tell me, dear—have I done well?”

“Oh, I quite think so, papa.... Have you had a pleasant trip across?”

“No, no, let us be frank now; let us make use of plain terms, let’s not mince matters, Eve; come now, tell your papa—my own, my sweet—will you have de Courcy?”

“Oh, as to that, why, I think so, papa,” replied Miss Eve with some appearance of surprise about the eye-brows. “I thought that that was rather understood as a settled thing: ask Ruth, ask aunt: they’ll tell you that Monsieur de Courcy, that model of morals, high at the head of my list, hasn’t a rival to dread.”

Upon this the father turned with an opening of the arms toward the other ladies, saying, “Why, this is well.... You didn’t tell me!”

No reply was made to him; only the Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard exchanged half a smile with Madame Grammont, who just shrugged, while Miss Ruth remained with her eyelids drooped.

“Why, that’s all right, then!” cried Mr. Vickery to Miss Eve: “I knew, I knew, that my dear’s instincts would strike true. Well, de Courcy should have nearly reached Versailles by this, and—you’ll be sending him away a happy man, will you? Is that settled?”

The young lady, contemplating her father’s face with a calm smile, replied, “Quite settled, papa—for _my_ share. If it _can_ be, it shall be.”

“‘_Can_ be?’ What does she mean?”—Mr. Vickery threw this whisper at the other ladies behind him; but before anything further could be uttered, a bomb was hurled into the _salon_ by the words of a servant who entered, saying “Monsieur Lepsius to talk with Mr. Vickery”—and he handed a card.

Straight sprang Mr. Vickery up, Miss Eve also raising herself by degrees, and all with blanched cheeks gaped in silence at the menial, till Mr. Vickery, his visage rushing into crimson, cried in a high and hysteric kind of cry, “Say to that gentleman that Mr. Vickery, being engaged, begs him to state his business by letter!”

The menial bowed and backed out, and immediately now there reigned a gale of breaths among the ladies, Madame Grammont and the countess making a thousand gesticulations together, Mr. Vickery standing again pale-faced by a reaction, Miss Ruth at him instigating him to be grim, Miss Eve moving about from place to place, reading the titles of books, glancing at trees outside, glancing at looking-glasses.

It lasted four minutes, which seemed much more, after which the menial was once more there, bearing a note scribbled in pencil, whose folds Mr. Vickery tremblingly opened. Miss Ruth meantime breathing in his ear, “Pray, papa, do not read it aloud!”—words which Miss Eve either heard or surmised, for now immediately she muttered with some huff, “Oh, I have no wish to hear anything,” and went away.

The rest then, laying their heads over the note, read the words: “Dear sir,—I, a suitor for your daughter’s hand, having run a race with another suitor to your door, and having won the race, am amazed at your want of fairness and also of forethought in refusing me an audience. Why do you? Pray question yourself. Can any king with a rope restrain the rolling of rivers or the drift of fate? I warn you that you waste your time in this, causing me also the woe of wasting mine; nor could that be just to another suitor to permit Miss Eve Vickery in a freakish humour to promise him marriage, since she has no such intention, knowing that such a nonsense is not on the files of life.—LEPSIUS.”

It was Madame Grammont who, gifted with the strongest eyesight, read the note aloud in a monotone, the gloaming in the room having now grown very heavy; and as she finished, and all raised their eyes, all started, for there afresh was Miss Eve, who had been seen to leave the chamber, hovering anew near to hear.

“I am not to be browbeaten!” suddenly cried Mr. Vickery in a high kind of cry.

“Ah, papa, no agitation, papa!” Miss Ruth called through a throat whose music broke.

“I say I am not to be browbeaten, I am not to be threatened!” screamed Mr. Vickery querulously afresh in an ecstasy, for the atmosphere was all electric, and each one present caught from all the rest a hectic cheek and a lip of quivering.

“My God, I foresaw all! and my advice was not followed,” cried the Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard, with a casting up of the hands.

“‘The files of life,’ ‘the drift of fate’!” Madame Grammont muttered in a maze.

“Get my daughter’s trunks packed!” cried the father; “am I an Englishman? Are there no laws?”

“Calm, papa, calm!” called out Miss Ruth anew: “ah, how disastrous! papa, I warn you, this agitation is fatal to the welfare of the soul!”

“Oh, Ruth, let one alone!” now said the countess in an irritation without restraint; “it is you who are the cause of all, at the end of the tale.”

“Aunt, I?” asked Miss Ruth, with reproach lodged in the soul of her eyes.

“But no, Margaret, but no,” protested Madame Grammont: “it is not the fault of Ruth, it is not the fault of Ruth.”

“Let me get my girl out of this infernal country!” now cried out the high-strung Mr. Vickery; “it is France that has done this!”

“Oh, but be reasonable, Matthieu, at the end of the tale!” the countess mouthed, with intolerance.

“Quite right, papa,” now cried out Miss Eve in a spirit of rollicking and recklessness, “let us clearly prove to everyone that we act in no ‘humour of freak,’ having a will of our own!”

“My love!” cried Mr. Vickery.

“‘The files of life,’” mused Madame Grammont anew; “‘humour of freakishness’!”

“Ah, but he is right, believe me!” cried the Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard; “he has his meaning! he knows Eve better than she knows herself.”

“You and others may _think_ so, Aunt,” called Miss Eve, snapping her thumb and finger daintily up in the air, with a wheel on her feet.

“But he may still be there!” said Madame Grammont; “is he still there at the door, Gabriel?”

“Monsieur Lepsius has departed, madame,” the gaudy Gabriel gave answer, who through all this had stood there with a bowed brow.

“What happened in the hall?” asked the countess. “Did Monsieur Lepsius make any attempt to enter?”

“Monsieur Lepsius desired to enter, madame,” answered Gabriel, “when I gave him Mr. Vickery’s reply that it might be better for him to state his business by letter; but on his attempt to force an entrance, both Baptiste and myself barred his advance with our arms outspread, and he then, after staring a moment into our faces, broke into a laugh, hastily wrote the note that has been handed you, and drove very quickly away.”

“Did Monsieur Lepsius utter any remark at all?” Madame Grammont began to ask, but before the words were well uttered, there had entered another flunky, who came to proclaim the presence of Monsieur de Courcy at the door; whereupon—a renewed flutter and flurry of consultation! until the ladies rushed from the room, leaving Mr. Vickery to receive the visitor; and immediately in came the Minister of the Interior with his brisk and breezy air, but about his brow now a shade of deliberation.

They two then conversed together until the hour when the dinner-gong began to sing out, whereupon the ladies in their bravery came sailing in, smirking as superbly now as personalities translated beyond the concerns of earth; and after a little small-talk the visitor stepped away with them to dinner.

However, they had not well moved out of the room when now the telephone-rattle in the alcove started to prattle, upon which Mr. Vickery with passion in his heart darted back to it, and Miss Eve also doubled back to be near, though remaining far from her father in the centre of the apartment, staring.

“Who are you?” called Mr. Vickery, the receiver at his ear.

The answer was “Lepsius,” and even Miss Eve, though hovering away off in the middle of the room, could hear it in thunder, for the speaker now no doubt lay in his whispering-gallery, where the sound-waves from his mouth, focusing themselves upon his telephone, struck monstrous rough, their grumble trumpeting unease upon Mr. Vickery’s ear-drum with the gutturalness of some grum god thundering; and, “I want to speak with Miss Eve Vickery,” grumbled the thunder.

“It is Mr. Vickery who hears you!”

“I know; allow one to speak with Miss Eve, Mr. Vickery!”

Now with wide eyes hied Miss Eve on tip-toe nigh, hissing, “_Say I am at dinner, papa!_”

“Miss Eve Vickery is about to sit down to dinner,” Mr. Vickery cried, with stricter accuracy.

“She will not eat much!... But as for you, Mr. Vickery, will you have me for a son-in-law?”

“The proposal sounds abrupt, Monsieur Lepsius!”

“Why so? How much waste of time is necessary? And what is your complaint against me? I quite fail to gather this.”

“It cannot be discussed over the telephone!”

“Why can it not? Is it that you are offended with me for kissing your daughter?”

“_S-s-s-s-s, sir!_... But I am being awaited at dinner, Monsieur Lepsius!”

“It was not I who wished to kiss her, it was she who wished to kiss me!”

“Eve, go! go!” screamed Mr. Vickery, warding his daughter away with one arm.

“Say, papa,” Miss Eve hissed, reaching far forward to her father’s ear with her cheeks afire, “that I am affianced to a good and gallant gentleman!”

“My daughter——” Mr. Vickery commenced to call.

“Tell Miss Eve, sir,” the thunderer rumbled, “that I can hear each word that she utters, and that I know she does not mean one syllable of any one of them.”

“I have to wish you good evening, Monsieur Lepsius!” cried Mr. Vickery with a high-pitched cry.

“Go, if you choose; but you prove yourself a feeble and foolish old pantaloon, you know.”

“And you, sir, a courteous young gentleman!” upon which Mr. Vickery put up the receiver, and went with one cheek-bone branded rosy, and one blanched, Miss Eve smiling, with her eyes alight, by his side.

The meal was then eaten serenely by all, after which, in the midst of Parisian chat in the salon, it was found not impossible to bring about, without intention, a _tête-à-tête_ between Miss Eve and the Minister of the Interior; and Monsieur de Courcy, having come through this with success, remained still on, the merriest of ministers and men, until close on eleven o’clock, when, hunted down by a mounted officer with a cipher, he made his bows, and went away.

And now anew the family sat in council to discuss the situation of affairs, though Miss Eve now took no share in it, seated far aloof, with her cheek on her palm, looking out into the dark of the park. At midnight she bid good-night; and, having gone up to her chamber, having been prepared for her bed, and having prayed by her bedside, was soon lying in the semi-gloom of a big bedroom, with her will bent upon slumber. But sleep she could not, though two hours went by. One of her jalousie-windows lying open, through this she could perceive trees, mountains, and in the sky a moon moving in and out among mounds of cloud, now drowning the countryside in shine, and now shrouding it in shadow; until this growing into a grievance and a weariness, at last she got up, swathed all that elongation of her form in a great drapery, got her violin and bow, and in an arm-chair by the jalousie played. So that she might not be heard, she had first shut the shutter and fixed the bar, though, as her apartments were in a rather remote part of the château, this was hardly very necessary, since it was Mendelssohn’s Andante which she chose to utter in a low tone; and there during many minutes she remained in a mood of drooping, moving the air of the room with the mazes of the music, roaming over and over anew through the same old moon-realms of melancholy, feeling even sleepy now, her ear wearied out with sweetness; until on a sudden she had sprung upon her feet, her cheeks struck white like a sheet, and her eyes wide with affright.

“Who is it?” she hoarsely hissed, for outside the shutter a tap had sounded.

“I! Open!” some chest panted to her, and she knew him, yet anew she hissed with all her wild heart in her windpipe, “_Who is it? What is it?_”

“The staple to which I hang is giving to my weight,” the chest gasped: “forty seconds and I fall a corpse.”

In ten Lepsius had leapt within the window....

And now were boundless breaths! and the rough sirocco broken free, flights for life, puffs, pantings, runnings to and fro, momentary manias, aimless aims! “Help!” hissed her hoarse heart’s breath, “this wardrobe, help!” whereat he, quite carried away by her rage of agitation, hardly knowing why, caught hold of one side of a wardrobe, while she bent and laboured at the other side, bearing it somewhither. But it was a huge mass Henri Quatre, which, being moved, naturally made some hubbub, so he threw the whisper across to her, “It makes a racket!” whereto her pant replied “Never mind, help!” and finally by tugs and effort they got one narrow side of it against a wall, one broad side against the bed-foot; and now anew she flew, with “This couch, help!” and he helped her to place the couch against the wall and against the bed-head; and now it was “Now, this chair!” and he helped her to heap an easy-chair upon the couch, feet up: which done, she scrambled quick across the bed’s breadth, and now stood in the place betwixt bed and wall, barricaded now from him in front by the bed, to the left by the wardrobe, to the right by the couch and the chair. And then immediately all that to-do was seen to be needless when her hand happened to hit upon a key in the wall behind her, for there was a door there in the wall, and a small window also by it above, and behind the door some steps leading up to another chamber a little above the bed-chamber; so immediately she scuttled through the door, locked it within, skipped up the four steps, appeared at the window, threw the key from her down upon the bed before him, and now succumbed to the floor, panting, safe at any rate from herself.

He, looking up to the window, threw out to her the whisper, “You are wise! You are witty!” upon which she sprang up to throw out to him the whisper, “Do not come across the bed!” for he stood now with one knee on it, and she could see him in a ray of the moon as she had first beheld him at The Towers in a red shirt loose about the neck and belt, without any jacket or hat; and he, too, could see her in shadow at the window.

“Did I not help you to escape?” he asked her; and then disjointedly, “Do you wear the half-coin which I sent you?”

Miss Eve gave no reply, getting by degrees her breath again in silence.

“Did you know in your heart,” he asked her, “that I would come to-night? You were waiting up for me, playing the fiddle; it was that Andante of Mendelssohn; you played it four times over.”

“Lepsius, you must go,” Miss Eve said.

“I will go near the peep of day, and you with me!”

“No, now; and without me, I think.”

“Oh, you are cold,” he replied, “and I hate your stone’s heart: cold by nature, and colder by hypocrisy that penetrates your texture to the core of you. Oh, I know and foreknow you to my agony, negative, null, enigmatic, like a watch which won’t go, though one goads it, and finally one crushes it under a rock; as frigid as that water of a mortal quality which drips from a rock in the territory of Nonacris; or like that bag——”

But she stopped him with, “Lepsius, you should go!” whereat he leaned keenly across to whisper her, “Cold! I am told that your mother was a patrician of a most ancient race, so from her you have that faintness of air, your rarity of blood, which makes you resemble lilies too super-cultivated and rare to transparency, or resemble that aroma that you exhale, or hoary old ages of Asia gone that give no answer to the historian’s gaze. No, the mortal heart can’t hold you all, you are far too large for me.... That superciliousness, all but Chinese somehow, in the heave of your eyebrow’s arch, that rather-too-much of the eyewhites shown below the irises ... though I admire, mind, the faintness of it, the faint disdain, the dieaway disdain, so confirmed and hoary, reposed and at home in the universe, with which you look out askance upon the world; and now dark circles will be under them, for I vow you shan’t sleep, and that will please me to be conscious that you are marked with dark underlids because of me.”

“I did not think,” Miss Eve rejoined, leaning both her elbows on the window’s sill, “that you were such a silly boy.”

He during some seconds did not answer this, drew back a bit from the bed with a bent head, reflecting, and then said, “Well, it is silly, it is self-sacrifice; and yet—curious! while I fought against you, since it is silly, I thought it sillier than after I gave in to you. Silly, indeed, I still see it, for these feelings of love make the blood to flow from the front of the brain to other caves of the frame—ruinously! so that loving is a reverting to lower-animal natures whose brains are less largely furnished with blood, the sense of romance and poetry in loving being due to some umbra of remembrance in us of old brutes, moons, and moods, of the geologic ooze, the deluge, the roll in the Jurassic morass, the rufous Vesuvius, the gloomy lagoon, when the moon glowed more big and close to this globe. Love is thus a fall and relapse; and yet—curiously——”

When he paused, she asked, “Well?” upon which he said, “My consciousness has been enlarged by it. I see, in fact, that though it is a fall toward the past, and silly, it is the one silliness that one may partly pardon oneself in view of its use to the future, because man will not always be man, and ages forward I see the sons’ sons of you and me a multitude, shining like stars in the sky, vaunting John to George in voices of joy. No other children instead of ours, if ours are preordained to be born, will do for this evolution: for, since we observe that the perfection which is purposed by the earth can never be accomplished but by a preordained marshalling of atoms, we know that, if this or that atom fails of its place, nothing can be done: far less if this or that baby fated to be born fails anon to be born.”

Miss Eve, her face half concealed with her palm, asked, “But _what_ is fated? that is the question. We imagine that what we wish is fated.”

“Love is apparently an instinct of fate,” Lepsius replied: “the lover prophesies in a kind of trance of triumphs to come. True, he is silly, since he sacrifices his time and life, but when he succumbs in his fight with the world-typhoon which whirls him to the moon, he can excuse his infirmity with a sense that this time it is worth while. I find that I have a tendency to reflect upon you in reveries extravagant to grotesqueness, comparing you with galaxies, fragrances, graces, fairies, lilies, with Dewildé, and Helen of Troy, and the boy Crobylus of Corinth, and that purple of Hermione whose wool was combed with poison-honey and oil of lotus; and though this is not strictly a truth at present of you, it is strictly a true instinct and prophecy of princes to spring through you. The line of your profile has a hint of hollowness to the eye, owing only to a most slight jutting of your chin’s point, a nothing which has overjoyed me with emotions the most poignant, with a sense of brotherhood for you, with a sense of the earth from her furnace-birth to her furthest sunsets, when the sun shall shine much nigher her, and the moon loom hugely: and I have compared you with ages, and with the Lady in the Chair of Cassiopeia. Or, looking sideways at you with your legs crossed, I have been struck by the great prolongation of your thigh-bones—so great that you could hardly run on your toes and palms, as I and apes may, since your kneecaps would doubtless graze the ground—so evolved, patrician: and I have cried extravagantly that, at their greatest stretch, the very galaxy would find space and to spare ’twixt their gaping gateway—an extravagance merely in appearance, since it is in a trance-dream of graces great even to _infinity_ in types fated to grow from you that I thus exclaim; it is my subconsciousness, nay, my consciousness somewhat, all bewildered with a blaze of the world-wonder, and how, darling, but in boundless words may the mortal heart blurt out a little that burden of the Eternal? Or when I think of my love’s upper-shape, so _élancé_, like the racer’s stretch of waist and neck, like one escaping, dodging, eluding upward—dodging, eluding the ape-shape—the very revelation of evolution——”

Here Miss Eve smiled, remarking dryly, “Lepsius, you are full of apes.”

“Aren’t you? Isn’t the world?” he asked; upon which she said, “Yes, I know your low view of men—and of women, I suppose, still more; but beside my _élancé_ upper-shape, my thigh-bone, my chin, my faded old air and hoary disdain of iris, I have a mind, which is jealous of your omission to mention it.”

“I meant to mention it!”

“Oh?” says she, “that was too sweet of you. Last but not least?”

“By no means least!” he answered earnestly: “a mind, I am certain, better than mine.”

“Ah, now you are insincere,” she said.

“I to you? As if I could be!” Lepsius replied with reproach; “I only, of course, mean a mind better than mine in possibility, since yours is uneducated, and mine more or less educated.”

“Mine un——! But what, then, is ‘education’ in your view?” she wished to know.

“Education,” he told her, “is a waking of one’s subconsciousness to consciousness. I, for instance, know nothing that you do not—or not much; but I am much more conscious of what we both know. Tell me, now—whereabouts were you twenty-four hours since?”

“Where?” repeated Miss Eve: “I was—here,” whereto he replied, “You see, that answer and its tone shows that your education was never initiated. You know, no doubt—are subconscious—that you were a thousand thousand, and half a thousand thousand, miles from here, flying at the speed of fifteen times a rifle-bullet’s rabies: subconscious, but not conscious of it. I, now, could never say ‘_here_’ in that fashion, without compunction, as though a million miles or two were of no account, Eve, since now and at each instant I can hardly but be conscious of this horse that jaunts us, and his ardour.... Oh, this race of man suppurates in dullness, you know, and I am sometimes most—lonely: I mention this to you that you may compassionate and come to me. I ride a star, inhabiting the unbounded as my house, and the rest, more drowsing than the dormouse, Tortoni’s; their glance of a morning darts no surprise of gladness at this romance of time, space and game of balls, the Grand Boulevard their galaxy, pigmies grey, phlegmatic, unflushed, unconscious of their contemporaries in a myriad realms of the creation, among whom are at this moment taking place great crises, hegiras, revolutions, doomsdays, moonfalls, vast marches, everlasting partings; they little know that Venus is uneven and severe in scenery, nor does the thundering of even the nearest sun stun their ear-drum; uneducated; not polite citizens of time and space.”

“But you remember——” Miss Eve started to say, but now, startled by some sound, breathed eagerly to him, “_did you hear something_?”

“It is a mouse going down the right sound-hole of your violin,” he replied; and now Miss Eve anew leaned her elbow on her window-sill to continue saying, “But you remember that all this you started to utter of _me_, then continued with ‘they,’ ‘they’; since then, as ‘they’ are so _I_, why are you there by my bed?”

“But are you not in all things far above me?” he asked, “save in this of a wakeful consciousness?”

“But this of a wakeful consciousness,” said she, “is everything, is it not? It is this which makes the difference between a genius and an ape, a god and a dog, you believe, do you not? And you have it, and not I. Only a thigh-bone I own, let me be thrown to a dog.”

Upon this Lepsius bent well across the bed to throw to her the whisper, “Hypocrite! Colder than the coldest Kydnus! It is your mind that I esteem, and in speaking of your thigh, implied it.... You should shun the mood of the modern woman of the West, ever touchy as to her footing, as to the spirit of the marriage-law, and men’s estimate of her mentality. Men _must_ admire the mind of woman, for since we know that we all get our wit from our mother, as our grit from our father, therefore I, having my mind from a female, must needs love the female mind with home-longing, as you, having your grit from a male, must love the male grit with home-longing; so it is not for my wit that you love me, but because you are instinctive that I am gritty and good; nor is it for your grit that I love you, but because I am instinctive that, if educated, you would be witty, and will make witty babies. Give up, then, I beg you, for ever, the idea that I despise your mind, since I do so idolise it; and believe, too, that, for each one of these reasons which I can discover for my love of you, myriads of other reasons exist, ineffable, unknowable to us, but in some manner known to that Man to whose behests men may at no moment but submit.”

“What Man is that?” Miss Eve asked, frowning, her wits rather winded now and flustered at the speed of her speaker’s thoughts.

“I mean, do I not,” said he, “the genius of our species? In every crowd of a thousand there are present, are there not? not a thousand, but a thousand and One, which One we can speak of as the ‘genius of the crowd,’ since it leads each of the thousand by the nose, making him behave in a totally different way than when alone—especially in such crowds as French crowds, which rush into action like one individual, as in ’92. So in _séances_ where those gathered believe that a ghost tilts their table, there is indeed a species of ghost-Man there, an eighth in a meeting of seven, a ‘genius of the crowd,’ compounded, no doubt, of the brain-rays radiated out from the seven. So, too, of the crowd who make up our human race: a Genius-of-the-species, his escutcheon and escheats mentioned on no census-sheet, leads us at each moment, teaching me to know and adore you, and none below the sun but you: to know you well: the very mood of the tune which, if you could be turned into a rhapsody of music, you would produce, a tune with some alto undertone, more old-eternal than the world. Beloved. But I fail to utter half, beloved, my heart faints....”

“Do you love me?” Miss Eve asked him in a whisper, leaning now far out of her window to him, who leaned near to her.

“Beloved,” Lepsius groaned, and again, “beloved.... When I came home from the Quai d’Orsay last night, I dropped down in a drowse, and, with the feast of your kiss still warm in my mouth, I thought in my dream that your feet walked with mine athwart fields of asphodel in future far, far off under a forlorn and morphia moon—I could not tell you. Then in the dark of the morning I awaked, and you were not there in my arms. I passed my palm thrice across my bed of straws, but you were nowhere there; so I had the thought that my darling might be in the garden, among the lilies by the lake, gazing up at my casement, a thought half-crazy, half-drowsy; but up I bounded and raced all round the palace-walls, gazing down into the gardens in order to spy you out and call you up, and you were nowhere there. If one of the spokes of the kite-contrivance on which I fly had not been broken, I should have flown to you. But I ran down, got out, and began to run to you; and the _sergents de ville_ must have asked themselves where Lepsius was rushing to under the morning stars, with half a thought, perhaps, in their heart’s heart of a _coup d’état_.”

“You didn’t come,” Miss Eve observed.

“No,” he answered, “I turned back; four leagues to Versailles, and I had already lost a good deal of time on your account.... Eve, I have lost hours.”

This he avowed with a bowed brow, and “Dear me,” breathed Miss Eve with irony; then, suddenly, like one whose will arises and triumphs, added, “It would have been so fruitless, too.... Lepsius, you should, perhaps, be given to know—can you see? this one is the ring: I am engaged.”

“Bomb of _poudre Rachel_,” Lepsius mumbled with a chuckle; “so you came to an arrangement with de Courcy this evening?”

“Yes, then,” Miss Eve said, _her_ left shoulder, too, shaken a second by a chuckle.

“And the same night you admit another lover to your bed-chamber!” he said, chuckling.

“Oh, well,” she muttered with lowered lids, chuckling within one shoulder, and they chuckled one with the other.

“Are ladies, then, restrained by no scruples as to justice?” Lepsius asked. “Delighter in lies! enigma! through what abstruse movement of your bosom did you get yourself into this embroglio? Not that it matters; but you will inflict a sense of injury upon this man, who has done you no injury,” a speech at which in one instant Miss Eve flew into a passion, and, leaning forth, thrice struck the window-sill imperiously, crying through a gruff throat, “As God is my witness——”

“Sh-h-h,” Lepsius went.

“Let me speak!” she imperiously hissed: “I mean to marry him, do you hear it? Heaven be my witness!” and up she threw her eyes, trembling as she held them bent on high.

“Eve, no,” said Lepsius gently: “you do not mean to do that; you believe that you do, but meantime in your subconsciousness you firmly confide in me never to permit such an absurdity, and so can afford to boast and be wayward.... Dear, would it not certainly kill us both?”

“If it kills a host I will do it!” Miss Eve heatedly replied; “never through life have I broken a promise, nor now shall begin with a vow; given and pledged is my troth; God be my witness in this.”

“But _why_ did you give it and pledge it? I can’t guess!”

“Because I chose!”

“Cogent waste of three words!”

“I shall never have _you_, anyway!” she said with a nod and threat of the head.

“And why?” he asked in a bewilderment.

“Because you despise my mind!” she sharply replied.

“I have already explained why that is quite impossible,” he made answer.

“Oh, woman knows her own secret, and people’s explanations make no impression upon her intuitions. You despise my mind; and there’s this still deeper reason against any getting together of you and me, that I despise yours.”

“I despise it, too; yet I endure it.”

“Oh!” she sighed, “that untrue humility of yours, it irritates me to the soul, till I hate! ... doubly untrue because insincere, and because, if it were sincere, it would be true to facts: for whereas you regard yourself as far greater than all, all as as far greater than you as you fancy them smaller, since your greatness is bedraggled rags that prevents you from being good. Oh, why are you not some ordinary wight, a young workman, Lepsius, a mason, a sailor, who has never learned to spell? Then some girl would so gleefully desert all her father’s—— But now, ah, _il desir vive, e la speranza è morta_!... Do you, by the way, still believe it fine to steal?”

“Successfully, you mean?” he said quickly; “stealing seldom needs much show of wit, but _swindling_ is very frequently fine. You, I know, do not appreciate its fineness, but to me it is evident; it is lying in deed as you frequently do in speech.”

That this would give the profoundest offence Lepsius had no grounds to think, lying being to his philosophy no crime; but with that chastity of the swan, which, being but brushed in her array of whiteness, frills and ruffles awhile, then with majesty swims away, so she ruffled.

“Not ‘frequently,’ I think,” Miss Eve repeated; “if I ‘lie,’ it is to myself, unwittingly; and in every event differ from you in fancying it ‘fine.’ Anyhow, now you can see how what you have wanted is out of the question.”

At this Lepsius, looking at her under his eyes, said, “Eve, be sincere with me!”

“I mean to be sincere,” Miss Eve told him; “I do hope I am; yes, I _am_. We hate each other, Lepsius, shockingly, like cat and dog, oh, we _do_, do not gainsay it. _I_ lack a culture you have, _you_ lack a culture I have—in my very marrow. Oh, I know that you are awfully clever and all that, and you fancy that because you can deck me with queenship I shall be dashing myself feverish and shivering upon your breast, little dreaming that the more thrones you throw before my feet, the more bitterly I’ll spurn and keep you groaning in purgatory eternally. They say that just before the Exhibition you will be shooting into the sky a kind of sun infused with stored-up moonlight, which will make private lights at night useless through Europe, and France the richest of the nations; and that then, during the business of the Exhibition, you mean in a _coup d’état_ to seize the throne, so as to sweep France off to overrun Providence knows what. It sounds mighty grand—I don’t know if it is true; I only know—forgive my outspokenness—that it is howlingly vulgar, that it is not Christian, and that I should have far greater joy of a young mason or sailor-boy who behaves graciously to his father—one with a belt, may be, and your figure—that is——”

She stopped, and he said, “I listen,” but as she added nothing, he then said, “‘Vulgar,’ ‘not Christian’; your criticism, of course, interests one, though it is curious.”

“Tell me,” Miss Eve said, “for whose weal do you purpose all that slaughter and upheaval—for the world’s?”

“For my own,” he said: “the weal of the world is in the management of the Genius-of-the-world, Who ceaselessly sees to it. I personally am not concerned in it.”

“Then,” replied Miss Eve, “that is what I mean by ‘vulgar’ and ‘not Christian.’”

“One idea or two?” he asked.

“No, one.”

Lepsius sat slowly aside on the bed, puzzling to understand her mind; and he said that he should have called Japan a far less ‘vulgar’ land than England, to which Miss Eve replied that if Japan was really the less vulgar, that could only signify that Japan was the more Christian.

“Clearly, then,” said Lepsius, “‘Christian’ bears in your mind some meaning of which I am not yet aware, since Japan does not pretend to be Christian. I will see one day in the month following the Exhibition just what Christianity is; but, as I knew that religions have all so far been infant fancies, and as the religion of Europe is so slightly in the minds of the peoples whom I mean to govern, I have never given myself the pains to investigate it. And you do not say for what reason I ought to cease from my schemes because they are ‘vulgar’ and ‘not Christian.’ Vulgar they are, since I am a man, and man is a temporary and trumpery little race, ingrained, whatsoever it attempts, with vulgarity. But put yourself, beloved, in my place: what can I find to do with my life? I am sequestered in the world; and it has occurred to me that that would entertain me to make a world-state. True, I might have turned my life to the delights of research, with the idea of laying the foundations of knowledge in the world: it is, however, such a work! since I should have to begin quite at the beginning, and I shirked it. You may have no idea what a mess your little knowledge or ‘science,’ as you say, is in! Without foundation, top-heavy, like the education of a child who has been made to learn the Babylonish Talmud by rote, but can write not one word of his own tongue. The so-called ‘scientists’ know the stars of the night, and talk in millions of millions; but as to the elements of knowledge, as to, say, the nature of gravitation, and what is the ground-reason why their candle-grease dribbles downward instead of bounding skyward, or why it is that the atoms in a twig or anything cling together, though when one breaks the twig, and then again puts the broken ends together, the atoms won’t any longer cling, they possess no more notion than the chimpanzee. Knowledge without foundation; vague, then, foggy, gappy: so that one may say, man knows nothing, and of that little which he knows he is but subconscious, hardly at all conscious. However, when these schemes of mine which you have called ‘vulgar’ are accomplished, I mean to turn almost the whole vigour of the world toward research and the gaining of some little ground-knowledge of the nature of things: for undoubtedly the want of this knowledge is what is now chiefly unwell with our species. But I mustn’t say to you, beloved, that men’s good is my aim, my only aim being to bustle and bluff a little as the governor of a globe in space.”

“But if a million men are killed by it?” Miss Eve remarked.

“Dear, it will not matter,” Lepsius replied.

“Will it matter if you are killed?”

“It will to you, to no one else, since everyone dislikes me.”

“But _one_ will clamour and cry out, you think? One will bleat and beat the breast?”

“Dear, it will not happen; I am so easily the king of men.”

“Better, may be, if it did.... No, it is all awfully low, Lepsius, I say, even lower than Cæsar, as low as Napoleon, and proves how many a thousand miles divide you from me and from men: for far at fault, I can see, is what you said just now that Christ’s religion is but ‘slightly in the mind’ of the crowd! Deeply the world has breathed of its atmosphere, yes, and the murderer Burke, guillotined in the week gone, deep in its stream was immersed, everywhere save at his heel. One sees that, when one hears _you_ speak. Do you know those words of Julian as to that Jew workman, ‘thou hast conquered, O Galilean’?—so scarcely true then, how greatly true now! You who can see, don’t you notice how pity prevails like the flood, and how charity roars like an ocean? Christs on the ’bus, at the ball, martyrs that saunter in clubs? Firemen, nurses, the Red Cross; the blind boy pampered and spoiled; the sweater and swindler inwardly worked with a qualm for the world’s weal; the moon on her throne still ruling, seducing the rudeness which roars in the tides with her mild smile, still by the touch of a Robe virtue disbursed through the world; and with that hem of his vesture encrimsoned, treading the wine-press of history, the white Christ travels, or, riding his triumph, rides on the foal of an ass over dominions and thrones. When you said, Lepsius, that self-sacrifice is silly——”

But here Lepsius stopped her with the whisper, “someone is coming!” on which the lips of Miss Eve, going at once quite sheet-white, breathed, “God! it must be my sister! Lepsius! go!”

“Why should I?” Lepsius said.

“Lepsius!”—she was beside herself—“would you compromise me? Lepsius? For ever? Would you?” for she herself could now catch the sound of something, a door moving open in an outer room.

“If I go,” Lepsius whispered, “may I come every night?”

“Every——” Even in that storm of her eagerness for his going Miss Eve paused; but she breathed, “Yes, every night—the key!”

In an instant the key was handed her, and he out of the outer window: on which she, too, in some seconds was down, was across the bed and at the outer window, all her breath breathing down to him fifteen feet below, “Every night! But I shan’t ever be here!”

She could just catch his ejaculation of “Wretch!” and as she snatched her fiddle, dashed herself into the chair at the casement, and arranged her drapery, soft footfalls came on the carpet, the elder sister breathing, “Eve! not in bed. Oh, Eve!”

“Dear,” said Miss Eve with languor, “I couldn’t get to sleep; I was playing the fiddle....”

“Well, I knew it.... I had a feeling that you were not asleep, so I got up and came to you, and here you are. Poor Evie! Cast your care upon God, will you, Eve?... But playing at this hour! And—where’s the bow?”

“I put the bow over there.... Oh, Ruth, put your hand on my brow, I have a headache,” upon which, her head now lying back on the chair-back, she shut down her eyelids, and Miss Ruth, stooping, held her hand over the brow of trouble, groaning now and again a little in her soul, her cheek pressed against Miss Eve’s cheek, till presently she breathed, “That better now?”

“Yes, sweet, that’s sweet,” Miss Eve breathed.... “Sweet, Lepsius was here.”

“Eve, here?”

And now, under the compulsion of that touch upon her brow, Miss Eve breathed out the whole story.

The sandals of Lepsius, meanwhile, were speeding away, till they arrived at his phaeton awaiting him beneath trees at Viroflay by the forest of Meudon, where, throwing himself in, under the setting moon he went tearing by way of Sèvres, Boulogne, Passy, to the palace. There, at the top of a stair, he was awaited by a man in robes of the Orient with a scraggy grey beard, hollow cheeks, and a nose mostly nostrils which gaped, who, with ever a wagging and nodding of his head, stood gossiping and gassing to Shan Healy: his name, Nundcumar. And these two, Shan Healy and Nundcumar, when Lepsius had mounted the stair, hastened without speech after their master’s speed.

It was when they three were in the midst of a corridor whose two rows of cressets seemed to meet at its remoter end, that Lepsius suddenly peered ahead, stopped, and murmured very low in Urdu to Nundcumar, “Anyone new in the palace to-day?”

Perhaps a second lapsed before Nundcumar answered, “One: a person who can spangle silk-muslin with gold of Dacca for the women-folk.”

“Tell! Man or woman?”

“It was a woman. She——”

“Name.”

“I cannot at this moment remember her——”

“Tell! European?”

“Yes. She——”

Lepsius walked on; but after some steps, without stopping, went slower, and now beckoning Nundcumar to him, said low, “_You_ walk before.”

Nundcumar’s eyes opened with some apprehension as he began to walk on ahead, and immediately Lepsius brought forth from the bag of his shirt a species of pigmy weapon which one fired off by pressure upon a button.

The walls here had hangings of tinsel at intervals, between these being daubs on the walls themselves by Hindoo artists in hues as warmly gaudy to the eye as water flooded with the sun’s after-glow. And it was when Nundcumar, having reached the middle of the corridor, was at the extremity of a hanging, that on a sudden he cast up his arms, all shivering, with shrieks which pierced the ear, vitriol eating now that doughy nose-tip, streaming down his beard. Meantime, Lepsius had swung forth by the elbow a woman who had been hidden behind the hanging, and in the quickest demisemiquavers fired two pairs of bullets, one into her right wrist, one into the left, one into her right foot, one into the left. Then during a few seconds he peered with a curiosity of disgust into the disfigurement of the squealing Hindoo, and was gone, throwing behind him to Shan Healy, who was kneeling over Jeanne Auvache, the order, “Call in the police.”

He then made his way to the place where he slept: an apartment as broad as the palace in that part, resembling a barn, but possessing no walls on three of its faces, only processions of columns of marble which bore up three architraves. Within this chamber a hound—a mastiff all but as large as Lepsius himself—was pacing about; and when Lepsius had well bolted four doors, had again loaded his weapon, had placed it on some straw strewn over one angle of the plain of floor, had let his gaze muse some moments upon the moon going down within a couch of clouds which she flushed, and now had thrown himself down upon the bed of straw, the hound moved to lie down by his side, and both soon dozed.