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Buscarlet was eager to do his bidding. O'Neill frowned as he picked up the lamp. "Careful," he said, in a low voice to Regnault. "Oh," said Regnault, "this is not an emotion." He laughed again. Across the room Buscarlet lifted the shade from the lamp and held it up.
Buscarlet, standing behind the bed, was trembling like a man in an ague. "I'll go to Ronda, and do what I can," said O'Neill, "so long as you're playing fair. But I've got to be sure of that, Regnault." Regnault nodded again. "I see," he answered. "What shall I say to you? Will you not trust me, O'Neill, in a question of taste? Morals I don't say. But taste come now!"
"If it's anything I can do, I'll do it, of course," said O'Neill awkwardly. He aided Buscarlet to set the bed to rights and change the pillow- cover, conscious that Regnault was watching him all the time with a smile. "One should have a nun here," remarked Buscarlet. "They come for so much a day, and do everything." "Yes," said Regnault; "everything. Who could stand that!"
Buscarlet opened the door to him, his eyes wide and bewildered behind his spectacles. "How is he?" asked O'Neill curtly, entering the great room. "Ill," answered the other. "Very ill, so that one cannot tell whether he sleeps or wakes. There should be a nun here to nurse him, only " O'Neill nodded.
Buscarlet, trembling but officious, wiped his brow and babbled commiserations. "Ah!" said Regnault, putting up a thin hand to stop him. "It takes one by the throat, this affair." Though he spoke quietly, his voice had yet the conscious fullness, the deliberate inflection, of a man accustomed to speak to an audience. "Yes," said O'Neill. "Were you sleeping?" The sick man smiled.
He wrote painfully on the paper which they gave him. "There," he said, when he had done. "And now I will compose myself." Buscarlet saw O'Neill forth of the door, for he was to leave for Spain in the morning. On the threshold he tapped O'Neill on the arm. "It is worth a hundred thousand francs," he whispered, with startled eyes. "And besides, what a souvenir!"
It was an old chronicle of passion and undiscipline, of a vehement personality naming through the capitals of Europe, its trail marked by scandals and violences, ending in the quick oblivion which comes to compensate for such lives. On the whole, he thought, such a marriage was what one would have looked for in Regnault; as Buscarlet said, one might almost have guessed.
What memories he must have!" O'Neill grunted, with his eyes on the bed. "He's had a beastly life, if that's what you mean," he said, "Who was the woman? "One might almost have guessed that, too," said Buscarlet. He rose. "Come and see," he said.
"Is she in Paris, d'you know? We might send for her." "I do not know," replied Buscarlet. "Nobody knows, but I have heard she retired upon religion." Their talk dwindled a little then. O'Neill found himself dwelling in thought upon that long-ago marriage of the great artist with Lola, the dancer.
Buscarlet's former pupils, went after her departure. Buscarlet had a dream which she described the following morning in a letter to Mme. Moratief, dated 10 December. She wrote, to quote her own words: "You and I were on a country-road when a carriage passed in front of us and a voice from inside called to us. When we came up to the carriage, we saw Mlle.
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