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Not only were privations, dismal hauntings of siege and slaughter, left behind, and M. Destournelle, just now most wearisome of lovers, left behind also, but de Vallorbes himself had, for the time being, become a permissibly negligible quantity. The news of more fighting, more bloodshed, had just reached her, though the German armies were marching back to the now wholly German Rhine.

He is far from well. I am watching over and nursing him." The last statement trenched boldly on fiction. As she made it Madame de Vallorbes moved forward, intending to follow the retreating Zélie down the steep, narrow street. For a minute M. Destournelle paused to recollect his ideas. Then he went quickly after her. "Stay, I implore you," he said. "Yes, I own at Pisa I lost myself.

"Hard words break no bones," she added lightly. "And so, to show how much I despised all such censorious cackle, I allowed Destournelle to travel south with me when I left Paris." "You pushed neglect of the worship of conventionality rather far," Richard said. Helen rose to her feet.

He will find his reward in the development of my genius and in the spectacle of our mutual felicity." Destournelle spoke with great rapidity. The street which they had now entered, from the far end of the piazza, was narrow. It was encumbered by a string of laden mules, by a stream of foot passengers.

"Do you mean to imply that Sir Richard Calmady would have the insolence, is so much the victim of insular prejudice as, to object to our intimacy?" Madame de Vallorbes clapped her hands together in a sort of frenzy. "Idiot, idiot," she repeated. "I wish I could kill you." Suddenly M. Paul Destournelle had all his wits about him.

Upon the inlaid writing-table in the anteroom, Helen found a long and impassioned epistle from Paul Destournelle. Perusal of it did not minister to peaceful sleep. In the small hours she left her bed, threw a silk dressing-gown about her, drew aside the heavy, blue-purple, window curtain and looked out. The sky was clear and starlit.

Vaguely he prayed it might all soon be over. Paul Destournelle looked down. He raised his eye-glass and bowed himself, examining Richard's mutilated legs and strangely-shod feet. He broke into a little, bleating, goat-like laugh. "Mais c'est etonnant!" he observed reflectively. "I was in his house," Helen continued. "I was there unprotected, having absolute faith in his loyalty."

And this drama she would not read to M. Destournelle not a bit of it. In it he should have neither part nor lot. Registering which determination, she shook her charming, honey-coloured head, holding up both hands with a gesture of humorous and well-defined repudiation.

Meanwhile, as she watched the rain streaming down the panes of the big windows, watched thin-legged, heavily-cloaked figures tacking, wind-buffeted, across the gray-black street into the shelter of some cavernous port cochère, it must be owned her spirits went very sensibly down into her boots. Even the presence of the despised and repudiated Destournelle would have been grateful to her.

She paused a moment. "He seduced me. Richard can you deny that?" "Canaille!" M. Destournelle murmured. He drew a pair of gloves through his hands, holding them by the finger-tips. The metal buttons of them were large, three on each wrist. Those gloves arrested Richard's attention oddly. "I do not deny it," Dickie said. "And having thus outraged, he deserted me. Do you deny that?"