old man; but, on the other hand, she would not lose anything, and she
would look amiable; it seemed to her also clever to have remembered
the few words about him which had been spoken by the Archduke. It is
just such _à propos_ remembrance, such connection of trifles, which
make clever detectives and successful spies. As the train ran on she
apparently listened to the chatter of Boo over a big sack of bonbons
and a big bouquet of lilies of the valley, but in herself she was
thinking that her ingenuity and intelligence had merited a better fate
than that of having to worry about hotel bills and scheme to marry
a banker. She did not like the idea of marrying Vanderlin, she did
not think he would be facile, though he had the reputation of being
generous; she did not think that he would be likely to let her make
ducks and drakes of European finance as it would have diverted her to
do in his place; he looked grave, he was serious and sad, and he bored
her. Besides, she would have preferred to marry no one. But there was
nothing else that she could do, or at least nothing else which promised
so well, which offered so much solidity and comfort for the future.
Therefore she went on through the olive-woods and by the edge of the
blue sea to Monte Carlo.

When Boo and the bouquets and bonbons were left in safety at the Hotel
de Paris, she caused herself to be dressed in the simplest black gown
she possessed, put a grey golfing-cloak over that, and with a felt hat
and a thick veil went out all alone; hoping to pass unperceived in this
place which was filled with hundreds of men and women of her world, and
hundreds also of worlds of which hers knew nothing.

She had learned that Prince Khris was to be found in a house out of
the town, where he had a modest chamber, whither he had been carried
speechless and apparently unconscious on the previous night, when he
had dropped, huddled and bent like a collapsed marionette, amidst a
crowd of gamblers who scarcely turned their heads to see what had
happened.

It was a small poor chamber over a grocer’s shop in the outskirts, in
which there lay dying the man who had seen sentinels present arms when
he had passed as a young child in his donkey chaise, with a lady of his
father’s Court in charge of him, across the Platz of the small ducal
city.

She felt a sense of pain as she ascended the narrow uncarpeted stair in
the close unpleasant atmosphere.

“Has he not even a valet?” she said to the old woman who left the shop
to show her the way upstairs.

“No, madame,” answered the woman. “We look after the poor old gentleman
as well as we can; there is only me and my sister; and one of us must
attend to the business.”

Mouse shivered a little as she heard; it was a realization of indigence
by which she had never been before confronted. Want of money she had
known, and debt and great anxiety; but she had never been without
servants, up a rickety stair, above a smelly little shop. It shocked
her to see a man of this rank, of her own world, thus utterly abandoned
like any beggar who had fallen by the roadside.

The frightful callousness of human nature when it is not softened
by deference to wealth and self-interest struck her with its chill
brutality like a handful of ice flung in her face. She was no kinder
herself; still the realization of the rough and jeering egotism of the
world momentarily hurt her. She thought of Buckingham dying alone
in the garret. There was the solidarity of class between her and the
fallen prince; and there was also the possibility that she herself
might some day, in some far away old age, be no better off than he.

The woman opened a low door as she spoke, and Mouse saw into the
room--a poor place with grey walls, a brick floor, spare furniture, and
a narrow bed, whereon lay what was left of the once courtly and elegant
person of Prince Khristof of Karstein. There was one window through
which the slope of an olive-covered hill was visible.

He was conscious, though motionless and speechless; he opened his eyes
at the unclosing of the door, but he did not recognize his visitor
through her thick veil. His features were twisted and drawn, his hands
lay supinely on the rough woollen coverlet; he looked almost already a
corpse: there was only life in the steel-blue, watching, apprehensive
eyes, into which at her appearance there came a gleam of wonder,
perhaps of hope.

“It is very horrible!” she said, with a thrill of genuine distress.

“Are you a relation, madame?” said the woman of the house.

“Only a friend. Does the doctor come often? What does he say?”

“He comes but little,” replied the woman. “He knows he will never be
paid, and he knows nothing will be of any use.”

“Is it quite hopeless?”

“It is only a question of hours.”

“Why did you not send for a _sœur_?”

“We did, but they are all out. Will you be at the charge of the burial,
madame?”

“Send for another,” said Mouse; “there are scores of them.”

“Will madame guarantee all expenses?” asked the woman.

Mouse hesitated; she did not wish to have her visit there known or her
name given.

“I am sure the family of the prince will repay everything,” she
answered. “They are great people.”

The woman smiled dubiously. “Is he really a prince, madame? They are
all princes here, but they pawn their shirts all the same.”

“He is really a prince--a serene highness; he is allied by blood to one
imperial house and two royal houses.”

The woman looked dubious still; a napoleon would have better eased her
doubts.

“That is nothing, madame,” she said with contempt; “those people pay
less willingly than anybody.”

During this colloquy the eyes of Prince Khris watched intently; his
brain was not clear, and his ears seemed stuffed up and filled with
buzzing noises, but he understood that they were talking of him. She
had put back her veil and he had recognized her. Why was the blonde
devil there? Why was not Olga there instead? He had forgotten time,
he had only a confused notion of things; he had recognized the blonde
devil and he was afraid she should get at his papers, but all the rest
was mist and confusion. His memory of his daughter was of her as a
little child--a little child in a white frock, with a pearl necklace
and great brown eyes and a cloud of dark soft hair. When she had been a
little child he had never done her any harm.

The old dame retired, well pleased to see a lady take her place, and
she, left alone, came up to the bedside forcing herself to conquer
her natural aversion to painful and unlovely scenes: she was vaguely
afraid of that mute, paralyzed figure. She dreaded intensely lest the
doctor should arrive before she should have been able to do what she
desired; but for that reason she deemed it prudent to seem anxious
for his presence. No one bent on a dubious errand would ever endeavor
to hasten a doctor’s arrival. The motionless figure on the bed looked
entirely unlike the man whom she had known as Khris Kar: entirely
unlike except for those steel-blue eyes which were staring at her
without recognition, but with challenge and inquiry, for his brain was
still conscious. That gaze frightened her. After all, what business had
she to be there? She was momentarily unnerved; but she had courage and
audacity, and she controlled her nerves and looked away not to see
those searching eyes in the lean, waxen, distorted face.

She went to the window and closed the wooden blinds, for the setting
sun was strong though winter was scarce past. Then she took off her
hat and veil, and moved about the small chamber putting it in order as
she had seen nurses do in sick-rooms, and filling a glass with fresh
water from a pitcher which stood on the floor. The place was horrible
to her; its air was close, its scent bad, its floor was not clean,
the chairs were rush-bottomed, the table was deal; but there was one
thing which belonged to a different sphere, one thing which attracted
her and seemed to suggest that her errand might not be fruitless--it
was a despatch-box of Russian leather, with initials and the crown
of a serene highness in gold or silver gilt above its lock. If there
were any papers of consequence in the room, that box, much battered
by frequent travel, contained them. Moreover, when she approached and
dusted it, she saw the eyes of the man on the bed dilate with menace.
She left it at once and cut a lemon into the glass of water and went to
the bedside with the drink. The shaded light fell across the bed. She
saw the eyes of the paralytic stare upward at her. Then into them came
a ray of comprehension--a flash of hate.

“It _is_ the blonde devil,” thought the still conscious brain, which
had lost all power to communicate its thoughts to the lips and tongue.

“Dear Prince, do you know me?” said his visitor very softly. “I am so
sorry to find you here, and so ill. I should like to be of some use.”

The kind, soft words found their way to the dulled, imprisoned brain;
she saw that by the expression of the eyes; for the eyes in answer
said to her: “I am half dead--I am almost wholly dead; but I am not so
utterly dead yet that I can be fooled by you. Blonde devil, what is it
that you come here to seek?”

She observed that his eyes, leaving her face, turned anxiously in the
direction where the despatch-box was; she saw also that round his
throat was a steel chain with a small gold key. In that box was there
any message for his daughter, or for Vanderlin, or any proof that he
had brought about their separation? It was evident that he was afraid
the box should be touched. This interested her. She was pleased that
her instinct had led her right. She did not dare to act in any way; he
might not be entirely paralyzed as the people said; he might not be so
absolutely sure to die, or to remain speechless until his death; she
knew nothing about his malady, except that he had dropped down suddenly
when punting at Monte Carlo.

She felt that he suspected her, that he would, if he had use of
his voice, have ordered her out of the room; she read all that
in his regard. Prudence necessitated the continuance of the very
tiresome _rôle_ of ministering angel. She dared do nothing until the
doctor should have confirmed the hopelessness of his state. She was
excruciatingly bored, and somewhat frightened. The horrible spectre on
the bed looked like a ghoul so lean, so colorless, so distorted, so
motionless. She had nothing to do, she felt a palpitating terror lest
he should recover the power of speech; she believed that people struck
down by hemiplegia did so recover it sometimes. She held a spoonful of
lemonade to his shut lips; but he did not open them, he only glared at
her. The spoon was of a common white metal, ugly, yellow, discolored;
she hated to touch it.

At that moment a heavy step was heard on the stair and a broad,
bearded, rough-looking man entered with his hat on his head; it was the
doctor.

“_Sapristi!_” he shouted very angrily; “what do you send for again and
again and again. The man is as good as dead. All the science in the
world could not save him. You waste my time. You----”

Catching sight then of a lady in the room he pulled off his hat and
muttered his excuses: he was very busy, he had many sick people, people
who were curable, the man on the bed could not recover.

“Oh, pray do not say so!” said Mouse with much apparent feeling. “Do
they not recover sometimes? I think I have heard----”

“A man of that age cannot recover,” said the doctor impatiently. “He is
practically dead already. He will not live through the night, if you
can call him still living. You are a relation?”

“No. But I have known him in other years, when he was less--less
fortunate; and I know all his people.”

“The lady says they are royal,” murmured the woman of the house.

“Royal!” echoed the doctor with scorn. “If they were the consul would
be after him like a dog after a bone.”

The consul! Mouse remembered with a shock that such a person might
indeed arrive at any moment. She had not thought of this possibility.

The doctor had gone up to the bed, turned down the bedclothes, placed
his stethoscope over the heart, and listened.

“He will die in three or four hours,” he said, as he turned again from
the bed. “The heart is exhausted; it has lost almost all power of
propulsion. Let me hear when all is over. Madame, your servant.”

He hurried out of the room, clapping his hat on his head and noisily
clattering down the stairs.

“You may go,” said Mouse to the woman of the house. “I will stay a few
hours here. Meantime try and get a _Sœur de Charité_.”

“Who will pay for all this expense, madame?” said the woman. “Who will
pay for the burial and all the rest?”

“You must send to the German consul--he will tell you,” said Mouse. “I
ought to have thought of it before. I cannot stay here much longer, but
I will stay till someone in authority comes. Go; send at once to the
consulate.”

“You talk very glibly of sending here and there and everywhere,” said
the woman rather rudely.

Mouse put ten francs into the woman’s hand, wishing to make a friend
of her. “And send for the consul at once that I may speak to him,” she
added, for she always remembered appearances.

It was growing dark. By her watch it was a quarter to six. All light
had faded off the olive-clad slope in front of the window. She had had
no afternoon tea. She began to want her dinner, and, after all, she
might be boring herself to no purpose, on a mere fool’s errand.

The woman came in with a petroleum lamp smelling atrociously.

“Send for a nun,” said Mouse, who only desired to get rid of her. “Send
for another doctor. The Prince cannot lie like this.”

“Very well, madame,” said the woman. “But errands cost money. People
won’t run messages for nothing.”

Mouse gave her some more silver and bade her find a messenger. She was
anxious to be rid of her, for in her presence it was impossible to open
the box. She was resolved to open it. It was not a pleasant thing to
do, but she had an intuitive sense that it was worth doing.

She was glad that neither the woman nor the doctor had asked her
who she was. She summoned all her fortitude to her assistance and
approached the bed.

She saw that he was, as the doctor said, very nearly lifeless. His
breathing was labored and painful, his heart scarcely beat any longer.
His eyes were closed. They had ceased to stare at her. How could she
sever the little steel chain round his throat? He could not cry out or
raise his hand to oppose her; she leaned over him and took hold of the
key. She shrank in all her nerves from the horror of touching him, but
she put a strong pressure on herself and tried to wrench the key from
the ring on which it hung. He seemed insensible and unaware of what
she was doing. But suddenly, as she succeeded in wrenching open the
ring, breaking her shell-like fingernails in doing so, his eyelids were
lifted and consciousness once more glared at her from his regard. She
felt herself turn white with terror and disgust, but she did not loosen
her hold and she pulled the key off the ring. His eyes cursed her, but
his curse was impotent.

She hurried to the leather box, fitted the key in its lock, and opened
it. She did not even look back at the bed. She was in haste lest the
consul or someone else should come up the stairs. In the box there
was nothing but papers. There were the diplomas of orders; there were
certificates of marriage and birth; there were some old letters; and
there was a large sealed packet addressed to Vanderlin. There was
nothing else. Whatever it might once have held of value had been
removed previously by himself, and the stars of the orders had been
pawned and lost.

She took out the packet addressed to Vanderlin, laid the other
documents in order, locked the box and returned to the bedside to put
back the key on the chain.

Then she saw a change which it was impossible to misread. He was dead.
The cerebral excitement, caused by his recognition of her and of her
endeavor to seize the key, had killed him. He was dead and could never
bear witness against her. She fastened the little key on its ring, drew
the sheet up over his breast, and with a shudder left the bedside.
Then she opened the bodice of her gown and put the packet against her
corset; it was bulky, but when she put on her golfing-cloak it did not
show.

When the German consul mounting the stairs opened the door of the
chamber he saw a lady in black and grey, who kneeled by the side of
the bed, the lamplight illumining the golden coils of her hair. He was
greatly touched and impressed. She rose from her knees and addressed
him with a sweet, sad gravity.

“My poor old friend expired but a moment ago,” she said softly. “I am
so glad I came. He would otherwise have died in solitude. Oh, how harsh
and cruel is the world!”

Then she gave him her name and address, said that she had known the
dead man from her childhood, and had come to nurse him because she had
understood that he was all alone.

The consul, a simple sturdy man of business, was deeply moved. When he
had executed the few formalities necessary, and affixed his seal to the
despatch-box, he begged this charming and compassionate stranger to
allow him the honor of driving her back to her hotel.

“Why was not his daughter with him?” she said to the consul. “Oh, I
know why--they have quarrelled; but it is such a sacred tie! Surely----”

“The Countess Olga has always been most generous to her father,
madame,” replied the gentleman. “But it was of no use. It was pouring
money into sieve. I have telegraphed to her. She will probably come in
person, but she cannot be here before another day at the least.”

“How fortunate I had the start of her!” thought the ministering angel
of this deathbed, as she watched the consul affix his seals to the old
despatch-box, of which the only contents of any value were lying safe
against the satin and lace of her stays. She would have infinitely
preferred slipping away unseen from that sorry house, and finding
her way as she could, on foot or by cab, back to her hotel unseen by
anyone. But her mind quickly grasped all the points of a question,
and she immediately perceived that her visit to be creditable must be
unconcealed, and when the fascinated official offered to drive her
back to her hotel, she accepted the offer, realizing all the solidity,
veracity, and respectability which his countenance of her conferred.
She left the woman of the house in charge of the dead body, and with
an aureole of virtue round her head descended the stair which she had
ascended on so questionable an errand.

CHAPTER XLIII.

When she reached the hotel, everyone was already gone to the concert
at the Casino; it was Thursday night; she got to her own rooms
unperceived, and told her maid that she had lost her way in the
olive-woods, was terribly tired, and only wished for some hot soup and
a cutlet, she was indeed fatigued and worn out; she had found the good
consul’s cab dreadfully slow and rickety; his great coat had smelt
unpleasantly of very coarse tobacco, and the night was cold and the way
into the town seemed endless.

She did not venture to look at the packet she had stolen until she was
safely in the warmth of her bed, with a reading lamp beside her, and
an eider-down quilt over her. She did not feel at ease, and she was
haunted by vague terrors. The steel-blue eyes of the dying man haunted
her. Hatred, powerless, but only the more intense for its impotency,
had stared at her with a look which she felt that she would never
forget if she lived for a hundred years. Moreover, she knew that she
had committed a crime, or what people would call a crime if they knew
of it. She knew that it had been an ugly thing to do; the kind of
thing which people who are well-born and well-bred do not do. There is
a class of sins which are well-bred; there is another class which is
caddish. She knew that this act of hers belonged to the latter category.

Nevertheless, she opened the packet when she was quite safe from
interruption, whilst the mellowed light of her reading lamp shed its
soft radiance on her pillow, and the billets of olive-wood were burning
fragrantly upon the hearth. Her pulses beat unevenly as she opened it,
for it was very possible that she had gone through all this agitation
and danger quite uselessly. There might be nothing in it whatever of
interest or value.

She undid it with great care so as to leave the seals unbroken. Oddly
enough, there recurred to her at that moment the memory of her little
son looking at her with his sorrowful angry eyes and saying:

“I don’t know much, but I think--I think--I think you are a wicked,
wicked woman!”

Was she a wicked woman?

It was a very unpleasant, vulgar kind of thing to be! She had always
thought that wicked women belonged exclusively to the lower classes.
The idea that she might be wicked was disagreeable to her; it was as
though she had been forced to wear a cheap gown or carry a cotton
umbrella.

The stare of the dying man had brought the same charge against her. She
did not think the charge was true. She was only a woman, all alone, in
difficult circumstances, who tried to help herself; that was all. The
fault was clearly with those who had placed her in those circumstances;
with Cocky first of all, with Ronald next, and, above all, with that
dreadful brute whose bones lay in the crypt at Vale Royal.

The documents were all in German, but she knew that language well
and read them easily. There was nothing dubious in them. They were
the confession of Khris of Karstein of the wickedness he had done in
bringing about the separation of his daughter from Adrian Vanderlin,
and the proofs of the false testimony he had caused to be brought
against her. They were indisputably genuine, attested, and positive.
They had been lying in his despatch-box for years; perhaps his remorse
had not been strong enough to impel him to condemn himself, or perhaps
he had reserved them for still greater stress of want when he could use
then to obtain subsidies, or perhaps, seeing nothing of Vanderlin, he
had been in doubt as to how far they would be welcome. She who had now
possessed herself of them did know how precious they would be esteemed.
But would she dare to give them to either Vanderlin or Olga zu Lynar?
What history could she invent, plausible enough, probable enough, to
account naturally for her possession of them? Would she, if she could
think of one--would she have the courage (some people would call it the
effrontery) to carry through such a piece of comedy?

Her nerve had been shaken by all she had suffered from William
Massarene. She was no longer as sure of her own audacity and dexterity
as she once had been. She would have burnt these papers without the
slightest hesitation if burning them would have done her any good;
but their disposal, unburnt, cost her much torturing indecision, and
she could not forget the glare of old Khris’s dying eyes, so full of
impotent hatred.

On the other hand, as they were genuine, and bore internal evidence
of their _bonâ fides_, there could not be any doubt thrown on their
accuracy, nor on the unblemished motives of her intervention. No one
could blame her for giving documents to the person to whom they were
addressed. She understood that they were worth many millions to the man
made of millions, as Boo called him. She read them all twice over to be
sure that she had made no mistake in her perusal and estimate of them.
No! She had made none. Their meaning was clear as crystal. There could
not be two constructions of their text and import.

What should she do with them? She was uncertain.

Where was Vanderlin?

In Paris, they said.

Burn them, and continue her scheme of marriage?

Tell him, and withhold them until she got what she wanted?

Either choice had its drawbacks. She was conscious that both were what
people would call discreditable. She endeavored to think of something
which should not be discreditable, yet should be profitable.

Sitting up against her pillows with a pink plush dressing-jacket
trimmed with swansdown on her shoulders, and her bright hair rolled
closely round her head, she looked a charming, innocent, poetic picture
in the warm and fragrant atmosphere of her chamber.

Painful emotions were odious to her; tragic events still more so;
she liked her life to be all dressing and dining and flirting, doing
theatres, leading cotillons, hunting with the best horses, laughing and
being amused, the whole sprinkled intrigue and stimulated by exciting
much passion and feeling a little.

But anything serious she detested, anything painful annoyed her.

She wished she had let the despatch-box alone. She was alarmed and
discouraged. The papers were all which she had expected to find them,
but she had not courage to use them. She was like a person who steals
jewels and then is afraid to sell them, or pawn them, or wear them, for
fear of inquiry. She cried a little from the wretched tension of her
nerves and over-fatigue. She took a few drops of chloral and put the
documents under her pillow and decided to try and go to sleep. Night
brings counsel.

In the morning, after her bath and her coffee, things wore a different
aspect. She did not see the old man’s dying stare, nor the boy’s
reproachful sad eyes, any longer. She made up her mind suddenly; she
said to her maid, “Pack up a day gown and an evening gown--I am going
away for two days.” And said to Boo’s governess, “Take care of Lady
Beatrix, and don’t let her get into mischief; and take care nobody lets
her go to the Casino.”

She wrote a telegram to Wuffie at Cannes: “So thankful I came. I could
soothe his dying hours, and persuaded him to a tardy repentance. I go
to Paris on his errand. The consul is charged with his burial. Will
explain on return.”

The consul’s name looked well, she thought, in this message.

The young cuirassier did not recognize his correspondent in this
mood; but he was simple and sentimental by temperament, and he was in
love. He put the note in his pocket with a photograph of her which
he had carried for three months next his heart, and went to the
golfing-ground. He could not resist speaking of her there to a cousin,
a very big cousin, no less a person than the gentleman with the glassy
eyes whom Katherine Massarene once had snubbed.

“Is it not good of her?” he said enthusiastically to this very big
cousin.

“Extremely good,” replied that gentleman. “So very good, indeed, that
I have difficulty in picturing the duchess in such a _rôle_. But women
are protean.”

Wuffie pondered on the reply and failed to understand it.

She, meanwhile, of whom the great personage spoke so irreverently,
was rushing swiftly across Central France, her strength sustained by
a well-filled tea-basket of the latest invention, and most extensive
resources. With her traveled the dead man’s papers. She was alone
nearly all the way; at that season everyone was coming southward, few
were going northward, except some English members leaving Monte Carlo
play and pigeon-shooting for the opening of Parliament, rueful and
gloomy at their lot.

Her mind was filled with unformed plans and conflicting projects. She
formed a fresh one every minute. She could not decide what would be the
surest wisdom, and she felt so afraid of her own indecision that Paris
was reached all too soon for her.

She went to her favorite hotel and had a night’s rest. There was snow
in Paris and on the surrounding country. The temperature seemed very
low after that of the Alpes Maritimes, and her spirits sank with the
mercury. But in the morning she had herself dressed becomingly with
sable furs which enhanced the beauty and delicacy of her complexion and
the golden gleam of her hair, and went out of the Cour d’honneur of the
great caravanserai on foot. It was not very far from the end of the Rue
de Rivoli in which there was situated the vast and imposing building
called the Maison Vanderlin, where ministers were suppliants and kings
were debtors. Her heart quaked within her as she ascended its broad
white steps.

Even yet she had not decided what it would be best to say; but inside
her muff were the documents which she had taken from the despatch-box.

“Is M. Vanderlin in Paris?” she asked the stately functionary who
waited beside the inner glass doors.

“Yes, madame,” he answered.

“Is he in the bank this morning?”

“Yes, madame.”

She passed within. She gave her card.

“I require to see him alone,” she said to the officials who received
her.

“It will be impossible,” they answered her. “M. Vanderlin sees no one
except by appointment.”

“Try,” she urged on them. “Take my card. Say that I come on an urgent
matter.”

“It is impossible, madame,” they reiterated. “He never receives anyone
without previous arrangement, often weeks in advance. At this moment
the Minister of Foreign Affairs is with him.”

“Gaulois? Oh, I know him well! Show me to a private room, and when M.
Gaulois comes out, bring him to me.”

The officials were moved by the beauty and grace of the suppliant,
and consented to let her wait in a small apartment warmed as all the
building was by hot air, and looking on an inner court where a fountain
played.

The time that she waited was not more than twenty minutes, but it
seemed to her to be hours. At last the minister was ushered into her
presence; an agreeable, sagacious, unscrupulous man of the south of
France, who had begun life as an advocate in the town of Dax.

He was her humble servant; he was at her feet; he would move heaven and
earth to do her bidding; but if it were a question of seeing Vanderlin,
that was impossible; he regretted it profoundly, but it was impossible;
two ambassadors, a nuncio, an Orleans prince, and an English banker
were all waiting their turn of audience.

“One would think that he was a king!” she said irritably, while tears
of rage and disappointment started to her eyes.

“Alas! madame, he exercises the only sovereignty truly potent in modern
life--that of wealth,” said the minister. “He is greatly occupied, and
the rules which regulate his interviews are rigorously observed. May I
ask if you know him?”

“I know him, yes.” She added, after a moment’s hesitation, “I require
to see him. Prince Khristof of Karstein-Lowenthal is dead.”

Gaulois was astonished.

“That was the father of the lady he divorced? His death can have
nothing to do with Vanderlin?”

“Yes, it has; I require to see him.”

Gaulois was perplexed. At last he reluctantly consented to return to
Vanderlin’s room, and inform him of her presence and her desire. She
was again left alone; the rippling of the fountain the only sound on
the silence. She had burnt her boats; she could not turn back now. The
time again appeared to her interminable, though it was not more than
eight minutes before the minister returned.

“Dearest lady, I have done my uttermost, but it is impossible that he
can receive you here. If you will leave word where you are staying, he
will have the honor of waiting on you at four o’clock. Alas! men of
business are insensible and _farouches_! Allow me, duchess, to profit
by Vanderlin’s austerity, and enjoy the felicity of driving you home.”

There was nothing else to be done. She was forced to let the loquacious
and amiable Gaulois conduct her to his _coupé_, and was obliged to
laugh and talk with him, and consent to be carried by him to breakfast
with his wife at his official residence on the Quay d’Orsay. Since
William Massarene had passed out of her life, she had never found it
so hard to counterfeit the gaiety and interest which are necessary in
social intercourse.

“Did you tell M. Vanderlin of Prince Khristof’s death?” she asked of
Gaulois as he accompanied her downstairs after breakfast.

“_Ah, mon Dieu, non!_” exclaimed the minister. “Who speaks to any man
of a divorced wife’s family?”

“I was wondering if he had any feeling at all for the poor old man,”
she said with much pathos.

“I should think none; very pardonably,” replied the minister. “The poor
old man drew an allowance of a thousand francs a month from Vanderlin
and it all went in play.”

“But the poor prince had some conscience?”

“Had he indeed? He concealed it very carefully throughout a long life.”

“_Ma belle_ Sourisette!” he thought, “what secret have you got hold of
that you are going to try to sell to Vanderlin?”

He had been a lawyer, he was now a statesman; despite his loquacity
he was very discreet; he told no one that he had met her at the great
banking-house in the Rue de Rivoli.

By the time breakfast was over it was nearly three o’clock, and
when she returned to her hotel she gave an hour to her toilette. She
was conscious that she looked what Parisians call _défaite_. She was
nervous and undecided, and she dreaded the visit of Vanderlin whilst
she desired it. It was only a little after three when she went into her
_salon_ which looked on the Rue Rouget de Lisle; and sat down to wait
for him vainly trying to read the morning journals.

She always dressed in accordance with the character she assumed,
and she wore a rather sombre loose gown of grey velvet trimmed with
chincilla and old Mechlin lace, a kind of gown that Vittoria Colonna or
Blanche of Castille might have worn. Her own personality only revealed
itself in the diamond arrow run through the coils of her hair and the
little bouquet of heliotrope at her throat. She was melancholy but she
was preëminently seductive.

Punctually as the timepiece struck four Vanderlin was announced. He
entered and saluted her with his usual grave and distant courtesy.

“You desired to see me, madame? I am at your commands, of course. I
hope Mr. Gaulois explained that it was impossible for me to receive you
this morning.”

No one could have been more courteous, but she felt that he was on his
guard against her and that he saw her desire to see him singular; the
perception of that did not decrease the embarrassment she felt. She was
Venus, but he would never be Tannhäuser.

After all, she did not want him to be Tannhäuser: she only wanted some
small share of his million, some little mouse-like nibbling at his
golden store.

“You must have been much surprised at my request,” she said as she
motioned to him to be seated. “But I have a communication to make to
you. I was present at the death of Prince Khristof of Karstein.”

The expression of Vanderlin’s features grew very cold.

“The fact of that death was telegraphed to me,” he replied. “It cannot
concern me in any way.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Perfectly sure. Nor can I conceive why you, a total stranger, were
with him.”

“I was not a stranger to him. I have known him many years; and I am
about to marry his grandnephew. He was altogether abandoned; he had not
even a servant or a nurse; I did what I could.”

Vanderlin was silent; he, like the royal person on the golfing-ground,
had difficulty in imagining her in these circumstances. He wondered
what she was aiming at--what she desired.

“I did what I could,” she repeated; “he suffered greatly; he was
completely paralyzed; but for a few moments he recovered his speech a
little, and he made me understand--various things.”

She paused, hoping to excite his curiosity, wishing to induce him to
interrogate her. But he remained mute; he was used to listening in
silence whilst people revealed to him their necessities, described
their projects, or endeavored to awaken his sympathies.

She was discouraged and embarrassed. Changing her manner she said with
her natural abruptness.

“You were much attached to your wife, were you not?”

She had the pleasure of seeing his composure rudely disturbed; an
expression of extreme pain, a flush of extreme offence, came on his
face: an unhealed wound had been roughly touched.

“On that subject,” he said briefly, “I allow no one to speak to me. I
told you so at Les Mouettes.”

“But I am going to speak to you!” said Mouse with her more natural
manner, “whether you allow it or whether you don’t. As I tell you,
I will be quite frank with you,” she continued with a graceful
embarrassment which became her infinitely. “I had wished to know
you, to attract you if I could. Say it was vanity, necessity, love
of money--what you will; I admit that I had that idea when I was so
hospitably received by you.”

A gesture of impatience escaped him; she was telling him nothing that
he did not know.

“But,” she pursued, “when I had that brief conversation with you after
luncheon at your house, I understood that your heart was closed to
all except one memory. With the prior knowledge I possessed of your
wife’s father, and the recollection of certain hints he had given me,
I conceived the idea that he could if he chose establish her innocence.
I determined to try and persuade him to do so if he possessed the power
as I thought. I went for that purpose to Monte Carlo; and on reaching
there I learned that he had been struck down by hemiplegia at the
tables.”

He was now listening to her with great intentness, his eyes dwelling
on her with a searching interrogation which did not make her part the
easier to play. They were eyes trained to read the minds and penetrate
the falsehoods of others.

“I found the poor old Prince all alone in a miserable room with a bear
of a doctor, and not a nun even present to see to his wants. I am not
a very susceptible person, but it hurt me to think of what he was,
and all he might have been. I did what little I could for him, and he
recognized me, and was pleased; one could see that by his eyes. I sent
all over the place for nurses, for physicians, for the German consul,
for the Lutheran pastor, but no one came until the end--too late. He
had lodgings in an out-of-the-way country road; I suppose he could not
afford any better--everything went at the tables. Well, he recovered
his faculties a little, and he made me understand that he was repentant
and wretched because he had wronged his daughter and separated her from
you. He was almost inarticulate but I managed to make out his meaning;
I know German very well. I gathered that your wife was innocent; that
she was the victim of suborned witnesses, and that her father had been
the chief fabricator of the testimony which ruined her.”

Vanderlin with difficulty controlled his emotion. He was used to
conceal his thoughts, but for once his reserve broke down, and he was
unable to conceal his anxiety.

“Go on! Go on!” he said in a breathless vein. “Are there any proofs of
what you say?”

“Hear me out,” she said with some impatience. “What Khris said was
mumbled, incoherent, rambling, his tongue moved with difficulty. But I
understood so much as this. That the lady they call the Countess Olga
zu Lynar, and whom as you gave me to understand you have never ceased
to regret, is absolutely innocent of any offence against you. Your
jealousy was wickedly aroused and your credulity abused.”

“These are words!” cried Vanderlin. “I want proof! What proof did he
give you? He was always a knave and a comedian.”

“Poor old Khris!” said Mouse softy and sadly. “He was sincere on his
deathbed, at any rate, for he confessed to sins which no one would
wittingly assume.” Then she added with a certain embarrassed but
graceful _câlinerie_, “I have proof, proof positive; his attestation
and those of his bribed witnesses. But what will you give me for them?
I am a very poor woman, M. Vanderlin, and you are a very rich man!”

Vanderlin rose impetuously; he looked twenty years younger; the mask
of impassive coldness which he had worn so long dropped; his natural
expression was revealed, his eyes shone with the light of hope and
expectation.

“I will give you anything you wish!” he answered. “Anything! Of what
use is wealth without happiness?”

She changed her tactics, for she knew that to make any demand was
dangerous and unseemly; and she realized that this man’s gratitude
would be boundless and his generosity as great.

“It was only my jest,” she said with a smile. “I am not a
_cabrioleuse_. Here are the documents. I am, of course, not a very good
judge of such things, but they seem to me quite indisputable.”

Then risking everything on one chance she gave him the packet.

He turned away from her and went to one of the windows and stood so
that she could not see his countenance, whilst he examined the papers
with the swift but unerring perusal of a man accustomed every day of
his life to examine and adjudicate upon important documents.

It seemed to her years that he stood thus, the curtain falling so that
she could not see his face. Her anxiety was terrible. If the papers
should not satisfy him? If he did not desire reunion with his wife? If
her own acts should appear to him, as they well might do, effrontery,
interference, attempt at extortion? Above all, if he should not believe
the description she had given him of the last moments of Khristof of
Karstein? She was safe from all risk of contradiction. The doctor
could not declare that the dying man had not recovered speech during
his absence. The consul had only arrived when he was already dead. The
woman of the house could testify to the presence of the foreign lady
in the chamber from early afternoon to late evening. Her narrative was
absolutely safe from any discovery of its falsity. But still, she felt
afraid of Vanderlin. Since she had seen the interior of that great
establishment of the Rue de Rivoli, and had heard of all those great
personages waiting in his antechamber, he seemed a much more imposing
individuality to her than had seemed the sad and solitary master of
Les Mouettes. But her conscience was clear. If she had cheated him in
the manner, she had not cheated him in the matter, of her revelations.
The papers were genuine. That was her great point. The one solid and
indisputable truth which underlay like a rock of safety her whole
impudent fabric of lies.

After what seemed to her a century of silence and suspense he left the
embrasure of the window and turned toward her. His face was still pale
and grave, but there was the light of a great happiness upon it, of an
immense relief; the frozen snows of an endless sorrow had melted in a
moment, the sun shone on his path once more.

“Madame, I thank you,” he said in a low voice which had a tremor in it.
“For eight years I have not lived. You have given me back to life.”

She had the supreme tact, the supreme self-control, to dismiss him as
though she had had no other purpose in her action than to do simply
what was natural and kind in obedience to a dead sinner’s trust.

“I am very glad,” she said simply, with that perfect intuition which
had so often served her purpose so well: “and now go. I am sure you
must wish to be alone. I am very, very glad to have been of use to you
and glad that the poor old man did make some true atonement at the
last.”

Profoundly touched, Vanderlin kissed her hands.

“I will return to-morrow at this hour; you must tell me your
embarrassments and employ my resources as you will. Command my
friendship as long as my life lasts.” He hesitated a moment, then added
with an infinite tenderness of tone: “I am sure you will also command
that of Olga.”

Left alone, as the door closed on him, she buried her face on the sofa
cushions and cried and laughed hysterically, for the strain on her
nerves had been very great. Then she threw her tear-wet handkerchief
into the air and played ball with it. What fools men were! Oh,
what fools! Taking their passions and affections so seriously and
tragically, and letting a love and its loss spoil all the gains of the
world to them. Then pride in her own genius and success danced like a
band of elves before her eyes. Sarah Bernhardt herself could not have
played that part with more exquisite art.

She touched the electric bell, bade them telephone for a _coupé_ and a
box at the Gymnase, and then had herself put in visiting trim, and when
the _coupé_ pulled up by the peristyle went out to see some friends of
the Faubourg St. Germain whose day for afternoon reception it happened
to be.

In the circles of the old aristocracy she was sure not to meet the
republican minister, Gaulois. She did not wish to see him. She felt as
if he would read in her eyes that she had triumphed in her interview
with Vanderlin. She was a little ashamed of what she had done; not
much, for success and shame are not sisters, but a little.

CHAPTER XLIV.

Two days later Olga zu Lynar was seated by her fireside in the home
of her choice in the Swabian Alb, where the March day had none of the
sunlight and fragrance of Monte Carlo. Snow was still deep in the
passes of the hills, and blocks of ice were breaking up on all the
rivers. The great oak and pine-woods were black against heavy storm
clouds, and enclosed the landscape on all sides save one, where they
were cleft abruptly by a narrow gorge, which alone gave access to the
world beyond.

The news of her father’s end at Monte Carlo had intensified the
melancholy of her thoughts. She had always hoped whilst he lived that
some revelation, some atonement, might come from him.

He was dead; and death carries with it its own depression, its own
hopelessness. Death in her father’s case seemed to her intensified in
horror, because it was the end of a base, valueless, miserable life. It
filled her with the same sort of despair which Hurstmanceaux had felt
on hearing that Cocky was dying at Staghurst.

Nothing could be undone; nothing could be atoned for; nothing could be
explained: he was dead in a gambling place; and had left no message for
her. The German consul had telegraphed to her that there had been no
papers found anywhere except the official declarations of his birth and
rank.

She had never expected anything, and yet now that he was dead, in
unforgiving and unconfessing silence, she felt as if some added
hopelessness settled down on her. She was still young in years, she
had the kind of beauty which never wholly passes away, she had wealth,
and she could have found many who would have willingly aided her to
forget and make her life anew. But she had no wish to do so. She was
proud, and she would not have returned to the world on sufferance, to
be pointed out and whispered about. She preferred the sombre, mediæval
loneliness of her Swabian solitude, where the household honored and the
peasantry loved her. To them she was the Countess Olga zu Lynar, whom
they had served and cherished and admired ever since she had been a
young child riding through the forests and climbing up the braes. For
them she was the daughter of their dear and revered lady; of Prince
Khris they had known little. Their affection and respect were feudal;
and if any stranger had said an injurious word of her in the woods
round Schloss Lynar, he would have found a deep and a sure grave in the
rushing waters of their mountain streams.

Here, if she did not find peace, she found what most resemble it:
security, repose, and uninterrupted thought.

The death of her father rudely disturbed that calmness, because it
awakened the passion and sorrows of the past as a single rifleshot
would wake all the sleeping echoes of the hills and woods.

She sat beside the hearth, a boarhound stretched out in the warmth at
her feet; the dull grey day seeming evening as its light came through
the panes of the deep mullioned windows. Where she sat was the old
Rittersaäl of the castle, with the armor, the shields, and the banners
of a hundred forgotten battles ranged down the oaken walls. She had
touched nothing. She had left it all as her grandfather had found and
left it. It was gloomy, but she liked the gloom. It hurt her less than
light and movement and modern luxuries, which were in such cruelly
ironical mockery of her own sorrow.

As she sat thus, her long cloth fur-bordered skirts falling about her
feet, and the fire light shining on her face, the dog sprang up with
a loud rolling bark and rushed from the hall. She heard wheels on the
rarely used and lonely drive, which passed round under the trees to the
chief entrance on the other side of the house.

Who could it be? No one ever came there except some man of business.
No doubt it was some consul, or some lawyer, come to speak of Prince
Khristof’s funeral, and be paid for it.

But she heard a voice say in the outer hall beyond in speaking to the
dog:

“What Oscar, good Oscar, have you not forgotten?”

The sound of the voice made her heart stand still.

It was eight long years since she had heard it. Was she sane? Was she
in her senses? Did she only dream, awake, as she had so often dreamed
in sleep all vainly?

She stood in the centre of the great dark hall and saw, as through a
mist, a person enter. She saw him put back the servants with a gesture,
she saw him turn and close the door and remain motionless, the dog
leaping upon him; but she saw it all as in a cloud, as though many,
many miles away, and she felt that it was only a vision which would
fade and pass, like so many other visions of her lonely nights.

He who had entered hesitated still some moments; then he drew nearer.

“Olga,” he said timidly: “Olga, can you forgive?”

She fell forward insensible into his outstretched arms.

She had dreamed vainly of reunion for so long; and at last the dream
had come true.

CHAPTER XLV.

“I’ll marry you, Wuffie,” said Mouse, three days later as she walked
along a secluded alley of the Casino gardens, whilst the sun sparkled
on marble balustrades and glossy orange leaves. “No; pray spare me
those ecstasies, and for goodness sake don’t use German endearments; it
sets my nerves on edge. Listen; there is a condition; perhaps you’ll
set your back up at it, and if you do I shall marry somebody else. _Il
n’y a que l’embarras du choix._”

She only cared for Woffram’s consent because he was the only one
amongst her adorers who could be brought with decent reason to accept
Vanderlin’s money; the only one also who combined the poverty which
could be bought with the high rank which would conceal the sale.

Besides, he was, as she said, a very pretty boy, with a Cupidon’s
face and a grenadier’s frame, and she thought that he would make _bon
ménage_, _i.e._, do exactly as he was told to do.

She knew society too well not to know that an English duchess is a
really much greater person than a German Serenissime, but she was tired
of being Duchess of Otterbourne on twopence-halfpenny a year, and being
under tutelage and coercion; and there were one or two royal princesses
whom she especially detested to whom it would be amusing to be cousin
by marriage, she could scratch them so deftly with the softest of
velvet paws.

On the whole, she thought it was the best thing to do, so she spoke
coldly and rudely to the young prince as he walked beside her. It was
the way she managed her men, and it had always succeeded--except once.

“Every wish of yours is law,” said Prince Woffram, radiant and
submissive, for he was extremely in love and had never seen any way
of inducing his syren to accept his sword and his title, which were
all he possessed in the world. She had always told him that he was a
nice-looking boy and wore a pretty uniform, and might follow her about
and carry her wraps, but was good for nothing more serious.

“Let us walk a little quicker, and don’t keep kissing my hand. It is
ridiculous,” she said, with some acerbity, for when you are going to
marry a man it is always best not to be too civil to him. “Now listen
here. Your greatuncle Khris is dead. I was with him when he died. I
persuaded him to do an act of very tardy justice to his daughter. I
knew the whole story long ago, and that was why I went to see him. I
wanted to try and persuade him to undo the harm he had done.”

The young man was silent. He was surprised and could not grasp her
meaning, for he knew that it must be something other than what her mere
words expressed.

“You never knew Olga, did you?” he said, rather stupidly.

“No,” said Mouse, keeping both hands in her muff. “I never knew her,
but I have always pitied her profoundly, and I knew her wicked old
father could set things right if he chose, for once he almost confessed
as much to me. But all this does not matter to you. It is an old story,
and they are now going to live happy ever afterwards like people in a
fairy-tale. That is their idea of felicity; it wouldn’t be mine. If you
would believe it, that man has never cared about anybody else. It seems
impossible, but it is so. I suppose men of business are not like other
people.”

“I don’t understand,” said the young prince humbly, and in great
perplexity. “Who are going to live happily for ever? Who are you
speaking of? Please tell me more.”

“Nobody wants you to understand--you are to listen,” said Mouse, with
her brilliant eyes flashing on him above her sable collar. “I tell you
I was with your greatuncle when he died, and he gave me his confession
to take to Adrian Vanderlin, and the proof of the false witness which
he had bribed people to bear against his daughter, because he was so
angry that she did so little to get her husband’s money for him (when
you think of it, that was natural enough, for one don’t give one’s
daughter into the _bourgeoise_ without expecting to be paid for it).
He played Iago’s part, you know, and Vanderlin was jealous, and your
cousin Olga was too proud to clear herself, and so they were made
very miserable and separated. Well, this is what he did and what he
confessed, and if I had not been there he would have had the papers
burned, for he was a bad, vindictive old man to the last.”

This she said with great sincerity and emphasis, for she saw in memory
the glare of those steel-blue eyes in the yellow, drawn face.

“But why should you have been the intermediary?” asked the young man,
bewildered. “Why did not poor old Khris send to my uncle Ernst (his
nephew, you know), who has always remained a devoted friend of Olga’s?”

“I don’t know _why_ he didn’t. I know he did not,” she replied
irritably, for she was not disposed to submit to cross-examination, and
she had by this time come to believe in her narrative as actual fact.
“I was there; and he was mortally ill. I doubt if anyone else would
have had patience to unravel his confused confessions.”

“Well?” said the young prince anxiously.

“Well, I have done Vanderlin an enormous service,” she continued.
“That is to say, with his peculiar ideas of fidelity, he thinks it
enormous. It is the ‘one man one vote’ theory, don’t you know. ‘One
life, one love’--that sort of thing. One has read of it. Great bosh,
but still--no, pray don’t go on like that or you will bore me to
extinction. Listen. You and I can’t marry as we are. We are as poor as
church mice. My people won’t and your people can’t do anything for us.
But Vanderlin will.”

“Vanderlin!” exclaimed Wuffie. He was dismayed and horrified; he was a
young man of easy principles, but there are some scruples which women
dance over like a stool at a cotillon, and which men jib at violently
as their hunters do at brick walls.

“If your pater ordered you to marry a royal schoolgirl, you’d take her
dower fast enough,” she continued; “and yet what disgraceful sources it
would come from--opium-taxes, and gin-palace-taxes, and dog-taxes, and
poor men’s sixpences and shillings, and nailmakers’ and glassworkers’
pennies, and real coinage, as one may say, out of vice and misery and
want.”

“You can’t be a republican--a socialist?” cried Prince Woffram in
horror.

“I don’t know whether I am or not. I dare say I may be. Anybody would
be to see a little German princeling, with twopence-halfpenny a year,
and whose granduncle has just died without money to pay his doctor’s
bill, giving himself airs as if he were somebody.”

“How dreadfully unkind you are,” murmured the young man.

“If you don’t like home-truths, you can go and amuse yourself anywhere
you like,” she replied, in a severe tone, her hands folded inside her
muff, and her coldest and most resolute expression on her face.

His heart sank into his boots. He walked on beside her, crestfallen and
conquered.

“I was quite frank with Cocky beforehand, and I am quite frank with
you. It is much the best way. There are no disappointments and no
recriminations.”

Prince Woffram did not reply. He did not care to fill the _rôle_ which
had suited Cocky so admirably, and he was, moreover, blindly in love
with her. Men in love do not like to be mere lay-figures. But he was
weak by disposition, and both his poverty and passion made him weaker
still.

“Vanderlin will do whatever we wish,” said Mouse sharply, with an
accent of inflexible authority. “He is made of millions, as Boo says,
and he is immensely grateful to me. He wants to give me half his
fortune, but of course he can’t give it to me, so I told him that I was
going to marry you, and that he might give it you; quite secretly, you
understand, and you will always consider that it is mine. That must be
very distinctly understood.”

The young man was silent; he was, indeed, overwhelmed with astonishment
and confusion. It seemed odd to hear that another man had been told of
her intention to marry him before he himself had been informed of his
future happiness; moreover, there was something about the projected
arrangement which struck jarringly on his not very sensitive conscience
and appalled him, and his proposed benefactor had divorced a woman of
his race!

He stammered some German phrases, embarrassed and apprehensive of her
displeasure, for he was afraid of her, keenly and childishly afraid.

“Don’t use that ridiculous language!” said Mouse, with a boundless
scorn for the mother tongue of Goethe and of Kant. “Have you understood
all I have been saying? If you accept what Vanderlin will do for
us--and he will do a great deal--I will marry you. If you won’t, I
shall never see you any more. Pray make no mistake about that.”

“But if you love me----”

“I never said I loved you. I don’t love people. I like you in a
way, and I will marry you on certain conditions, but I will not
marry you, my good Wuffie, to live on an empty title and the pay of
a German lieutenant of cuirassiers. Not if I know it! I won’t even
enter Germany, except for the month at Homburg when everybody’s
there. Thanks--I have seen your father’s court, once in the duchy of
Karstein-Lowenthal, and very often in the duchy of Gerolstein!”

She laughed cruelly, not relaxing her quick elastic step over the
smooth gravel between the palms and the orange-trees. She intended
to marry him, and she had no doubt whatever about the result of the
conversation. Men were like horses. Ride them with a firm hand and you
could put them at any timber you chose.

Prince Woffram’s face flushed painfully; the jeer at his father’s court
hurt him. As far as he could feel offence with her he felt it then, as
her clear unkind laughter rippled on the wintry air.

“You are very rough on me,” he said, humbly, in English. “I am poor--we
are poor--I know that; but honorable poverty----”

Mouse turned her face to him, withering scorn flashing from her
sapphire eyes upon him.

“Honorable poverty has just died in the person of Prince Khristof of
Karstein-Lowenthal, and he had not a penny to pay his laundress, and
his lodging, and his doctor, and his grave! Adrian Vanderlin paid for
all of them.”

She said it cruelly, triumphantly, with her silvery laugh sounding
shriller than usual.

The young man grew redder still with anger and shame commingled. His
eyes were downcast. He had no reply ready as he walked beside her down
the lonely alley.

She saw that she had wounded and offended him.

“Come, Wuffie, be reasonable,” she said, in another tone. “You know
well enough that I shall no more marry you to remain penniless than I
shall marry one of the croupiers in the Casino. If you were going to
ally yourself with a royal princess, you would see nothing degrading in
living on her allowance allotted to her by what is called the State,
that is, taken out of the taxes paid by the public on their sugar, and
tea, and cheese, and clothing, and yet, when you come to analyze it,
that is not very creditable. It is much more creditable to take what an
immensely rich financier never will miss, and offers, _de bon cœur_,
to acquit himself of a debt of gratitude; and since you are so fond of
your family, he is your cousin by marriage--at least he was and he will
be again, for he means to re-marry his lost angel. My dear Wuffie, pray
don’t mind my saying so, but German princes are living on their wives’
dowers all over the world by the hundred. It is their _métier_.”

He still did not answer. He looked on the ground as he walked. There
was sufficient truth in what she said for his national and family pride
to wince under it. He knew that if he looked at her he should consent
to this abominable, indefensible, unworthy act to which she tempted
him. He kept his eyes on the ground; the color burnt hotly in his
cheeks. She was silent too a few moments. Then she stopped short in her
walk, forcing him to stop also, and faced him, her hands in her muff
and her face very resolute and insolent, with a contemptuous smile on
her lips.

“My dear Wuffie,” she said with sovereign contempt, “you can’t suppose
that I was going to marry you for yourself, do you?”

The young man colored, much mortified. He had supposed so.

“You are a very pretty boy, but one doesn’t marry for good looks,” she
said in the same tone. “One marries for bread and butter. Neither you
nor I have got it; but together we can get it.”

“But--but----” stammered Prince Woffram; he knew that he was being
tempted to what was disgraceful; to what, judged by any court of honor,
would brand him as unworthy to wear his sword.

“Can you really think, my dear boy,” she said with a cruel, slighting
little laugh, “that I shall marry you for the mere sake of going, as
the wife of the sixth son of a six-hundredth-time-removed cousin of
the emperor, in the _défiler-cour_ at Berlin? I can assure you that
such a prospect would not attract me for a moment. I have no desire to
figure in the Salle once in ten years, and make jam and knit stockings
like a true German fürstin all the rest of my life. ‘_Kuche, kirche,
kinder_,’ was not said by your Imperial relative of me. If you accept
my conditions I will become your wife, but if you do not there are many
others who will. I like you very much, Wuffie, but I can live extremely
well without you, my dear boy.”

He strove to keep his eyes away from her face. He looked at the trees,
at the clouds, at the sea, then at the ground again. He knew that he
was being led to his own undoing, to his disgrace in his own eyes, to
the abandonment of self-respect and independence and manhood; he knew
that he would become Vanderlin’s pensioner and her slave, that he would
fall in his own sight to a lower place than was held by one of the
croupiers raking in gold at the tables yonder. He tried to keep his
eyes from her face. He had had a pious mother; he prayed for strength.

“Look at me, Wuffie!” she said imperiously.

The delicate scent of the perfumed muff was wafted to his nostrils like
a puff of incense from the altars of the Venusberg. He lifted his eyes
and saw hers, with their challenge, their mockery, their malice, their
command. He was lost.

A few minutes later Boo, who had been playing near, ran down the alley
at a headlong pace toward them, and lifted her rosebud mouth to be
kissed.

“You are going to be my new pappy, Wuffie!” she said, in her sweetest
and most innocent manner. “I’ve had two; but they’re both dead, and I
shall like you the best of the three, because you’re so pretty, Wuffie.”

And she sprang up into his arms, and laughed and beat him about the
eyes with a bunch of violets, and so dazzled and blinded him that he
had no time to ask himself--who had been the _two_ of whom she spoke?

Jack had a letter a month later which astonished and annoyed him. He
read it sitting in a favorite nook in one of the embrasures of the hall
windows at Faldon, with dogs between his knees, at his feet, under
his arms, and behind his back; young frolicsome foolish dogs, big and
little, who were the object of Ossian’s deepest scorn.

The letter was from Boo, and dated from a fashionable hotel in the Rue
Castiglione.

  “_Mammy says you are to come over_,” the note began abruptly. “_She’s
  writing to your gardjens. She is going to marry Wuffie. Wuffie is
  nicer than anybody as was before. He has such a beautiful white coat,
  and is all chaines, and orders, and swords that clatter, that is when
  he puts ’em on; when they’re off he don’t look more nor any other
  man; but she means to make him give up soldiering. She says you are
  to come over. You won’t carry her traine ’cos people as are widders
  don’t have traines when they marry, and besides you’re too old. But
  that don’t matter. I shall have a beautiful frock and Wuffie has
  gived me a tuckoiss belt. Don’t fret about your dress. They’ll dress
  you here. It’s on the third. Mammy sends you one hundred thousand
  kisses; me too. Au revoir. Auf weidersehn._”

For Boo, a true daughter of her time, could write correctly all
languages except her own.

This letter was painful to its recipient. He sat looking gloomily
out at the glades of the park where wild winds from St. George’s
Channel were swaying the great trees and driving the Faldon river into
scurrying clouds of brown foam.

“I’ll take it to him,” he thought. He had learned to know that his
uncle Ronnie was a rock of refuge. He got up as well as he could
for being embraced by all his dogs at once, and knocked down by a
Newfoundland twice in excess of adoration.

He found Hurstmanceaux at the other end of the house engaged in reading
his own correspondence of the morning.

“If you please is this true?”

“Is what true?”

“That my mother is to marry.”

He held out his sister’s letter.

“I don’t know if it means that. If it don’t mean that I can’t tell what
it means,” he added despondently.

“Your mother marries, yes,” said Hurstmanceaux, taking the note, “and
this letter says you are to go to Paris. Do you wish to go?”

Jack’s fair face grew almost stern.

“I will never go to her,” he said with more decision than could have
been expected from his years.

“Make no rash vows, my boy,” said Ronald. “But as regards your
appearance at this marriage it is not necessary; I think you are right
not to go.”

“I would not go if they dragged me with ropes through the sea from
Dublin Bay to Calais,” said Jack; “and up the Seine,” he added with a
geographical afterthought.

“She killed him, and she has forgotten him,” thought her son as he went
out with his dogs into the bare March avenues of the park. Jack did not
forget.

So it came to pass that at the brilliant wedding celebrated at the
English and German embassies, and attended by many great persons of
royal and noble families, there was not present either the eldest
brother or the eldest son of the lady who became H.S.H. Princess
Woffram of Karstein-Lowenthal.

CHAPTER XLVI.

In the following autumn Margaret Massarene caught cold. It was a
slight ailment at first, and if she had been the woman she had been
in North Dakota she would have soon thrown off the chill. But she had
experienced in her own person the perils with which she had once said
her William was menaced--her love of the good things of the table had
affected her liver and her digestive organs. She had never stinted
herself, as she had expressed it; indeed, she had overeaten herself
continually ever since that first wondrous day when her man had said to
her: “The pile’s made, old woman; we’ll go home and spend it.”

All the guinea-fowls, and pheasants, and oysters, and turtle, and
anchovies, and capons, and grouse, and prawns, and whitebait which
had been immolated on the altar of her appetite, had their posthumous
vengeance. Richemont, who had loathed her, had helped with his
exquisite inventions to hasten her undoing. She was naturally very
strong and of good constitution, but the incessant eating which
prevails in England, and which kills nine-tenths of its gentle people,
had been too much for her. Annual visits to German baths, to Carlsbad,
and to Vichy had warded off the evil, but could not wholly avert it.
When she got cold, the over-tasked liver and the failing gastric
juices struck work; the lungs were already feeble; and before a month
was over, after she had felt a chill as she came from church, she was
declared by her attendant physicians to be beyond their aid.

She had always been a meek and patient woman, accepting whatever came
to her, the bitter with the sweet, and she did not rebel now, though
the loss of life was hard to her.

“Just when I was in the straw-yard, as it were. Comfortable, like an
old horse as is past work and has had a good owner, not as many on ’em
has,” she murmured. It seemed an unkind disposition of Providence.
“But there! we don’t know what’s best for us!” she said, with that
submissive obedience to the frown of fate which she had shown so long
to the scowl of William Massarene. Her daughter was more sad than she.

“If I had only really loved her once for five minutes!” she thought.
But she had not. She had never felt a single thrill of those affections
of which the world is, or affects to be, so full.

She was devotion itself in attendance on her mother--watched by her
night and day, and addressed her with exquisite gentleness. But it was
pity, sorrow, compassion, regret, all other kind and tender emotions
which moved her, but amongst them there was no love. All the other gods
will come if called, but not love in any of his guises.

“Don’t ye try to feign what you don’t feel,” said Margaret Massarene.
“You’ve no feigning in you, my dear, and why should you try? You was
took away from me when you were a little thing of five, and you was
always kept away to be made a lady of (and that they _did_). It stood
to reason, as when you see me all them years after, you couldn’t have
no feeling for me. I was nought to you but a stranger, and I saw as my
way of talk hurt you.”

Katherine wept, leaning her head down on her mother’s broad, pallid
hand.

“Don’t ye fret, Kathleen! Why should you fret?” said the sick woman.
“You have nothin’ to blame yourself for--toward me, at any rate. I did
think as ’twas your duty to respect your father more in his life, and
to keep his great work together when he was gone. But there! you’d your
own way of lookin’ at things, and you’re not to be blamed for that.”

Then her weak voice failed her, and she lay looking out, through the
branches of an acacia-tree beyond the window, to the silvery line of
the sea.

“I did according to my light, mother,” said Katherine in a whisper. “I
may have been in error.”

“Ay, my dear,” said Margaret; “that’s what all you clever, eddicated
people do. You make a law for yourselves, and then you say you follow
it!”

It might be so.

What had seemed the voice of conscience might have been the voice of
vanity. She could not tell. Perhaps this poor, simple, vulgar woman had
been more in the right than she.

Some hours passed; one physician remained in the house, another came
and went; nothing was to be done. The human machine was worn out; it
had been ill-fed too long and then over-fed; its delicate and intricate
mechanism rebelled, waxed feeble, gave way altogether.

“I’d hev liked another ten years of it,” she said regretfully. “’Twas a
holiday like, the nice easy life. And you won’t ever know, my dear, how
hard I worked--over there.”

Then she cried feebly but sadly, thinking of those wearing and cruel
days in Dakota, in burning heat and freezing cold, when she had worked
so hard, and of this pleasant “lady’s life” which she had now to leave,
which had come too late to do much more than cause her such regret.
Katherine’s head was bowed down upon the bed.

“And you had no reward!”

“Oh, yes, my dear, I _had_ my reward! Don’t ever go for to say
otherwise! I see your father a great man and shaken by the hand by
princes and honored by everybody--except you.” Then her mind wandered
a little, and she said many things about her man’s renown, and his
virtues, and his attainments, and the height to which he had risen.
“Princes at his own table,” she murmured. “In his life and his death
they honored him. Look at his grave, piled up with flowers--nothin’ in
the Abbey ever grander.”

Once she raised herself on her elbow and took hold of her daughter’s
arm.

“Look you, child--divorce is as easy got out there as berries in the
fields in summer; a rich man can put away his wife like an old glove,
and he never did that--never! I was an eyesore to him, but he kept
me by him, and he had me dressed and served like a queen. He was a
God-fearing man, was William.”

All her memory was of him, of the brute who had scarcely ever thrown
her a kind word in all the forty years that she had dwelt beside him.

“He was a great man, a very great man, was your father,” she repeated.
“He’d have died a peer, and I dare say a minister too, if that shot
hadn’t killed him on his threshold.”

Her mind was little with her living daughter beside her; it was almost
entirely with the dead man who, when they had both been young, had
stepped out beside her through the green grass of Kilrathy to conquer
the world--and had done it.

“He was a great man, was William,” she said as she closed her eyes.
She looked at her worn fingers, on which the flesh hung in folds, and
turned the plain brass wedding ring feebly round and round; the ring
that was now covered by a diamond guard.

“’Twas a fine mornin’ as he put it there,” she murmured. “The sun was
shinin’ and the dew sparklin’, and I mind me of a little tit as sat on
a wild bit o’ sweetbriar against the church door. ’Tis a sweet feelin’,
Kathleen, when ye gives yerself for a man for good. But ye don’t care
about them feelin’s. You’re too high and too cold.”

“Oh, not cold! Oh, mother--no, not cold!”

“Well, you’re somethin’ as comes to the same thing,” said Margaret
wearily, and lay still. The light of the intellect must always seem
cold as Arctic light to those who only know the mellow warmth of the
sunshine of the heart.

Her daughter remained leaning against the bed upon her knees. She felt
as if so much atonement were due from her, and yet----? Perhaps she
should have remembered more the excuse which lay in society for the
faults of her father.

Society says to the successful man: “You have done well and wisely;
you have thought of yourself alone from your cradle.” Society offers
the premium of its flattery and its rewards to the man who succeeds,
without regard to the means he has employed. Provided he avoids
scandals which become public, there would be obvious impertinence in
any investigation into his methods. Society is only occupied with the
results. When he succeeds his qualities become virtues, as when a vine
bears fruit the chemicals which it has absorbed during its culture
become grapes. Public subscriptions will become accreditated to him
as divine charities; if he write his name down for a large sum at a
banquet at which a royal duke or a lord mayor presides, to enrich a
hospital or endow an asylum, he need fear no demands as to how he has
gained his vast capital. The man who succeeds knows that his sins will
be ignored because he has acquired greatly, as hers were forgiven
to Mary Magdalene because she had loved greatly. Can we blame a man
because his morality is not higher than that of the world in general?
“Get money, honestly if you can, but get money,” says society, and when
he has got it, if it has been got in quantities sufficiently large,
sovereigns and princes will visit him and require nothing more from him
than the fact and proof of its possession. Her father had not created
the worship of the golden calf; he had only availed himself of it; he
had only set up the animal in his own kailyard and opened his gates.

Great qualities he had undoubtedly possessed; if they were not lovable
or altruistic, or such as pleased the strict moralist or the poetic
philanthropist, they were such as are alone appreciated in an age which
would send the Nazarene to a treadmill and the Stagyrite to a _maison
centrale_ if they were living now.

Had she done wrong not to value them more? No; she could not think so.

“He was a great man, my dear, and he had a right to do as he liked with
his own,” her mother murmured again, faithful to the last, like a dog,
to the hand which, though it had struck her many a brutal blow, had
been her master’s.

“He was a great man, was William,” she said again; and then her mind
wandered away to the green wet pastures of Kilrathy, and she thought
she was a dairy-girl again with bare feet and kilted skirt, and she
called the cows to the milking: “Come, my pretties, come--Blossom and
Bell and Buttercup. Come; ’tis time.” Then her hands moved feebly, as
though they pulled the udders, and she smiled a little and would have
laughed, but she had no strength. “I’m home again,” she murmured; and
then life left her.

CHAPTER XLVII.

It was a gusty, wild, and cloudy morning at Faldon some days later,
and Hurstmanceaux sat in his library reading a communication which
he had received from the head of the Government. The epistle, which
was written by the premier himself, offered him the governorship of
a very important colony. The letter was extremely complimentary, and
there was no possible reason to doubt its sincerity. It urged upon
him the sacrifice of his independence to the welfare of his country,
and hinted that as years passed on it became time to abandon certain
eccentricities of opinion and habits of isolation. Hurstmanceaux read
it with the attention which the position of its writer demanded; but he
did not waste many minutes in its consideration. It was not the first
time that such offers had been pressed on him. The independence of his
character was so well known, and his principles so much respected by
all men, that his accession to the governing ranks would have been an
increase of strength to those who were in office. But they had never
been able to tempt him to forsake private for public life. He now wrote
a very courteous but most decided refusal, expressing his sense of the
compliment paid to him, sealed it with his signet ring, and sat still
awhile at his writing-table thinking.

“I have never yet been in the scramble for the loaves and fishes,” he
said to himself, “and I shall not begin now. He will find men enough
and to spare who have outrun the constable, or who want handles to
their names, and who will be delighted to go to the nether world
and play at pseudo-sovereignty. Faldon and my other poor places are
kingdoms enough for me, small ones though they be; and Jack’s active
mind is colony enough to cultivate.”

Whatever else Jack might be, he was half a Courcy, and must be brought
up to be a man and a gentleman.

At that moment Jack came in followed by his dogs of all sizes, on whom
Ossian, lying in a reading-chair, opened a contemptuous eye; Jack had
permission to run free of the library as he liked. He had now a morning
paper in his hand which he held out to his uncle.

“Mr. Adeane wishes me to ask you, please, if this is true,” he said,
pointing to a paragraph marked by his tutor.

Hurstmanceaux glanced at it. It announced his acceptance of the
Australian governorship. His brows contracted in displeasure. “Nothing
could be less true,” he answered. “It is true that the appointment has
been offered to me. But tell Adeane I decline it. Leave the paper here,
dear. I will send a contradiction.”

Jack went out by one of the windows opening on a terrace as he had
entered, his canine courtiers leaping about him, and Hurstmanceaux took
up the journal to see the date of the paragraph.

It was a journal of fashion and politics; the statement which concerned
him was in a column containing other items of news; the name in one of
these caught his eye; he read that the wife of William Massarene was
dead at her villa at Bournemouth.

When Katherine Massarene closed her mother’s eyes she felt both regret
and remorse. Why had she not had patience and penetration enough to do
justice to the unrecognized loyalty and affection in that existence
of which he had only seen the envelope of flesh, only despised the
narrowness and ignorance? She knew that she had never loved her mother;
she felt that she must have often, very often, caused her pain and
humiliation. She had persistently gazed at her mother’s foolishness and
commonness; she had never tried to be just to her better qualities.

Fine temperaments are always cruelly open to such self-reproach; she
never ceased to blame her own heartlessness, and when she followed
her only relative to the grave she said to herself, with exaggerated
self-censure, that she had rolled more than one stone to her mother’s
cairn.

She had indeed been indulgent, submissive, kind beyond that which many
would have thought incumbent upon her, but she forgot that she had been
so; she only remembered her own lack of feeling, her own intolerance
and antagonism, her own contemptuous isolation; all which had seemed as
cold as Greenland ice to the poor dead woman.

As regarded her own future she had made no plans. She would have liked
to take charge of the children’s orphanage which she had founded in her
mother’s name in County Down; but she thought to do so would look as if
she had been making a refuge for herself in creating the institution.
She wished to gain her own living, without favor, simply by means of
her head or her hands. She inclined toward music; she was enough of an
artist to make her mark in it; but the publicity necessitated would,
she knew, be very distasteful to her. For the moment she decided
nothing, but when she had buried her mother in the crypt of Vale
Royal, according to her last request, she returned to the house at
Bournemouth to pass there the few months during which it was still her
own. The Roxhalls had entreated her to remain with them, but she felt
an imperative longing for solitude.

“You are much too young to live alone,” said Roxhall to her.

“I feel a hundred years old,” she answered.

A great weight of what seemed to her unending regret lay like lead on
her life. She was the more unhappy because happiness had been offered
to her, and she had been obliged to refuse it, or had thought herself
to be so obliged. It would have been happiness, great and wondrous
happiness, but she tried not to think of it, lest the memory of what
might have been should entirely unnerve her for the combat of her life
to come. For one thing she was thankful--people had by this time quite
ceased to talk about her. Only a few old friends like the Framlinghams
and Lady Mary Altringham wrote to her. Nothing is easier than to drop
out of people’s recollection if you wish it; nor is it difficult if you
don’t.

She was a great deal on the sea and by the sea, and passed much of her
time when on shore in the pine-wood which belonged to the grounds. It
was sheltered, and no one ever intruded there; and to Argus it was a
sylvan paradise.

A day or two after her mother’s funeral she was seated on the same
bench where Framlingham and Hurstmanceaux had found her in an earlier
time. She was reading a letter from one of the poor people whom she had
raised from grinding misery in the States. It was a true and tender
letter, none the less welcome because ill-writ and ill-spelt. Sometimes
these rude letters have more eloquence in them than lies in Bossuet or
John Newman.

She read it twice, being touched by it, then laid it down on the bench
and looked out seaward.

It was a November day, but still and bright. In the west, beyond the
heaving expanse of grey water, the sun was going in rosy mists to his
setting; the outline of a great liner was black against the horizon;
midway in the Channel there were some fishing boats, trawlers, who
had put up lights betimes at their mastheads. Her face looked very
colorless as she sat there, the deep dull black of her dress made her
skin look like snow itself, and her ungloved hands, as they rested on
her lap, might have been the sculptured hands carved on the marble
breast of some recumbent figure in a crypt.

“I have often wished to be alone and free,” she thought. “I have my
wish.” And like most wishes in their fulfilment, this wish of hers was
not very sweet.

“May I speak to you?” said a man’s voice, which thrilled through the
innermost nerves of her being.

Instinctively she rose. Hurstmanceaux was standing as he had stood six
months before; he had his face to the sunset; its light shone in his
blue eyes; he uncovered his head; he did not touch her hand.

“I have come from Faldon to see you,” he said. “I read of your mother’s
death.”

She was silent; she had no idea what to say in answer.

“Did she suffer?”

“No; happily, not much.”

“You buried her at Vale Royal?”

“Yes; your cousin Roxhall gave permission.”

“Of course!”

Then silence ensued between them. The dog stood looking from one to
another; the sun sank down beyond the edge of the far sea.

“I came to speak to you,” said Hurstmanceaux with an effort. “I left
you in anger and offence, and you had answered me, I think, in too
great haste.”

“Oh, no----”

“Pardon me; hear me to the end. I have thought of little else since we
parted. I have not left Faldon. I have seen scarcely anyone, except my
little nephew and his tutor. I have had full time for reflection. Well,
what I come to say to you is this. Between you and me there ought not
to come, there ought not to exist, any unworthy misunderstandings born
of doubt, or temper, or suspicion. Such are unworthy of us both.”

“There was no misunderstanding.”

“I think there was. You chose to conceive that I desired what I should
regret if I obtained it, and I was too much in haste and in anger to
prove to you your error. One does not persuade angels to bless one’s
life, unless one wrestles with them. I took you by surprise. Perhaps I
spoke like a coxcomb in too great security. I should have remembered
that all you had ever seen in me had been intolerable rudeness. I
should have sued you more humbly----”

“Oh, how can you say such things?”

“I say the truth. I was too rough, too rash, too confident. I want you
to forget that: to only remember that in all I said I was entirely
sincere, and that in all you objected in answer you were entirely
wrong--absolutely and utterly mistaken. I once more offer you my name,
my heart, my life. No man can do more. I earnestly entreat you not to
let the world’s conventionalities or your own imaginations part us.”

She was profoundly moved by the words; she could not doubt their truth
or their loyalty. Incredible as it seemed to her, it was clear that
this sentiment which had brought him hither twice was one both deep and
lasting. But she could not and would not allow herself to be persuaded
to his hurt.

“What did my poor mother say on her deathbed? They sent me away from
her to be ‘_made_ a lady of.’ Lord Hurstmanceaux, your wife must be one
born, not made.”

He was silent; he was the most truthful of men and he believed
intensely in race.

“Listen to me,” he said at last. “I should be false to the tenets of
my life if I denied the influence of race. But there are exceptions
to all laws. There are beggars whom a Burleigh fitly mates with; that
is, I think, for Burleigh himself to judge. She cannot judge because,
like all generous persons, if she had the casting vote, she would vote
against herself. Let me speak for once; and only for once, of a subject
which is to me intolerable pain and shame. My sister, my best-beloved
sister, who is thoroughbred in every pulse of her blood and every
fibre of her being, dropped to the level of a courtezan for sake of
money. She was--there can be no doubt of it--your father’s mistress; of
details I know nothing, but the fact is beyond doubt.”

She tried to silence him.

“Oh, why--oh, why distress yourself thus? He is dead--she is married
again----”

“Those circumstances alter nothing. The fact must have been--what I
say. You yourself must have learnt or concluded it from his papers.”

She made no reply. She could not deny what was obvious.

“Now,” said Hurstmanceaux, and his face was white with pain as he
spoke, “race did not keep unsoiled in her either our name or her own
womanhood. I believe that you would keep both my honor and your own
immaculate. If you could care for me, do not let apprehensions and
doubts and mistrust divide our lives. I love you; is love so strange a
word to you that you cannot even guess what it wishes and suffers?”

His eyes rested on hers as he spoke. It seemed as if a blaze of
unbearable light inundated her soul.

“You love _me_!” she said in a hushed voice of great amaze.

“I love you. What is there so strange in that? I told you so six months
ago.”

She threw her arm round a young pine stem near her, and, leaning her
forehead on its rough bark, burst into tears.

“Lead me, guide me, take me if you will,” she said brokenly. “I have
trusted to my own wisdom, and perhaps I have always done wrong.”

CHAPTER XLVIII.

The château of Les Mouettes was lent for the coming winter season to
the Prince and Princess Woffram of Karstein by its owners, who, both
naturally generous, and made more generous still by happiness and a
sense of gratitude, were unceasing and inexhaustible in the wideness of
their goodwill. It was always well to oblige persons who are led away
by their feelings, thought the recipient of their bounties. Such people
do not inquire too minutely or measure too exactly. It is of such as
these that is made that succulent oyster which the wise man or woman
opens with his or her knife, and sucks the juices thereof.

Mouse had fully persuaded herself that she had done an admirable
action. She had made two people happy; if their happiness were idiotic,
and to her incomprehensible, it was none the less to them what their
hearts desired: no one can account for the tastes of others.

She really admired herself and quite succeeded in forgetting whatever
there might have been a little questionable or a little disagreeable to
explain about her visit to Prince Khris on his deathbed. The documents
had all been quite genuine; if she had embroidered a little on the
plain facts of how she had obtained them, that mattered to nobody.
Neither Vanderlin nor Olga ever doubted her narrative, and their
gratitude toward her found incessant expression. If Prince Woffram
doubted it he never said so. He had accepted its results, and his lips
were sealed.

She was standing on the sea-wall of the Mouettes on a bright and balmy
morning, looking herself as radiant as the morning, with a great bunch
of tea-roses at her breast, and a gold-headed cane in her hand, when
Daddy Gwyllian, who was staying at Cannes, came to her from the garden
side of the sea-terrace.

He was looking brimful of news and of amazement; a white cashmere
neckerchief was wound about his throat; he was wearing a fur coat
and little bunch of fresias at the buttonhole of it; he was visibly
agitated.

“My dear Princess!” he said, pressing her hands and quite forgetting
that he disliked her. “What you must suffer! How I sympathize! Who
could ever have thought it! A man of such sense! Perhaps if you had not
left England it would not have happened!”

“What on earth is the matter, Daddy?” asked Mouse, astonished and
curious. “Have you come to bring me bad news?”

“_You ask me!_” cried Daddy in amaze; then dropping his voice to a
sepulchral moan, he added, “Is it possible--possible--that you have not
heard of your brother’s fatal act?”

Over her face a cold and angry shadow passed.

“Has he killed himself?” she asked. “I don’t think he’d ever do
anything half so agreeable to others.”

Daddy Gwyllian drew a long breath.

“I am really grieved to be the bearer of such tidings,” he said, with
the very keenest relish in telling them. “But Ronnie--stay--you know
that the Massarene woman gave all that immense fortune away to the
poor?”

“Yes,” said Mouse impatiently. “I saw all that rubbish in the papers
long ago. What has that to do with Hurstmanceaux?”

“He has married her!” ejaculated Daddy. “Now!--now!--when she hasn’t
got a penny! Oh, Lord!”

“What!” she cried in turn, as she rose impetuously and stared at him.

“My dear lady! You may well be incredulous. It does seem impossible
that any man in his senses---- But he married her yesterday, down at
Bournemouth.”

“You foolish old gossip!” she cried, with a concentrated fury, which
almost stifled her voice. “Can you think of nothing better than to
frighten one with such preposterous inventions? My brother would never
even look at that creature.”

“I may be an old gossip, Princess,” said Daddy, with high offence and
some dignity, “but I do not consciously say what is not true. Will you
do me the honor to read this?”

He fumbled beneath his fur coat, his paletôt, and his morning coat,
and brought out a telegram, which he handed to her. It was dated from
Bournemouth, and addressed to Daddy himself.

  “_You often counselled me to marry the daughter of Mr. Massarene. I
  am happy to inform you that I have done so this morning. The ceremony
  was private: Alberic Orme officiated._”

It was signed--“Hurstmanceaux.”

She read the lines in a single glance.

“You advised him? You advised him to disgrace us like this!” she cried
with a furious gesture, crushing the dispatch in her hand, whilst her
azure eyes poured their lightning upon him.

“I advised him to do so when the young woman was rich. You sent her
down to Bedlowes yourself on purpose to bring it about. Perhaps, if you
had not shown your hand so openly, he might have done it when it would
have been a desirable thing to do. But I am a foolish old gossip, and
I will leave you to digest--er--this extremely unpleasant fact. I have
the honor to wish you good morning.”

He took himself off, very huffed, stiff, and alienated; he had
repossessed himself of his telegram.

Mouse stood still, convulsed with an inward fury, for which there was
no possible outward expression. She was stunned.

He had done it on purpose, she was convinced! On purpose to outrage her!

“Wherever I meet them first,” she said between her teeth: “if it be at
a Drawing-room--I will cut them both dead!”

“What is the matter, Sourisette?” asked one of her women friends who
was staying with her and approached as Daddy withdrew.

“You may well ask me. My brother has married the lowest of low women!”

“How very dreadful for you!” said the lady with sympathy. “But are you
quite sure? Because when I came away from England last week they said
he was going to marry Miss Massarene, the daughter of your good old
friend Billy.”

Mouse shuddered within herself. She could not hear the name of William
Massarene without a spasm of unbearable remembrance, and she felt that
her attitude of hostility was difficult to explain.

“He has married her. That is just the horror of it!” she said between
her teeth. “You know what they all were, the lowest of the low. As
acquaintances while they had their money, they were all very well: but
as a connection--it is too frightful! I will never speak to her--never,
never, not if I meet her at Osborne or Windsor.”

A servant at that moment brought her telegrams from Carrie Wisbeach,
and various other members of her family, all repeating the news and
reflecting her own views with regard to it.

Such a _mésalliance_! If the money had been there it would have been a
most admirable alliance, a most suitable arrangement, a most excellent
choice; but when the money was all gone back to the poor from whom it
had been extracted originally, the union was positively monstrous. If
he had married a pauper out of the county workhouse, it would have been
less insult to them; so they all agreed.

There is a kind of cynical frankness about “good society,” with regard
to its love of money, which is, perhaps, the only candid thing about
it. It sticks like a swarm of bees where money is, and it vanishes like
locusts before the north wind where it is not.

All the family and all the connections of Hurstmanceaux viewed his
marriage as she viewed it. If he had blown his brains out they would
have been less shocked, for they would have been able to say that he
had had an accident with a revolver or a repeating-rifle. But it was
impossible for them to explain away this act of insanity; and though he
would probably live down in the country, as people should do who are
ashamed of themselves, still, some time or other they would have to
meet him, and they felt uncomfortably certain that the head of their
house would compel from them respect and deference toward his wife.

Even those few friends who were sincerely attached to him felt, like
Daddy Gwyllian, that they could not venture to apologize for a man
who had shown such culpable indifference to his own interests and the
world’s opinion.

“What has disturbed you, my heart’s dearest?” said Prince Woffram as he
came on to the terrace on his return from a golfing match; he had met
Daddy Gwyllian a mile from the entrance gate, who had driven past him
merely touching his hat.

“What has disturbed you?” he continued. “Did that pleasant little old
gentleman come to bring you any ill news?”

Her answer was to throw the telegrams into his hands; from them he
gleaned some idea of what had passed.

“Your brother marries? Well, what does that matter?”

“What?” she echoed, her eyes shining and flashing with fury. “If he had
married a woman off the pavement of the Haymarket he could not have
disgraced us more utterly! And for Alberic Orme to countenance such a
disgrace! What an infamy!”

The young man raised his eyebrows and played with the tea-roses of the
balustrade. The placidity of his temper opposed itself to the violence
of hers like a marble breakwater to the fretting fury of a Venetian
lagoon in December.

“She will have my eldest son with her to poison his mind against me!”
she added, tears of genuine rage and grief overflowing her lovely eyes.
“Have they not even taken away my only daughter from my guardianship?”

The young man was silent; he was not grieved that his friend Boo had
been removed to England.

“He has married her merely to pass this insult on me!” she said with
tears which burnt her eyes like fire.

“That is scarcely probable, my beloved,” said Prince Woffram gently;
“the lady is not noble, it is true; but then you have great license in
these matters in Great Britain. Your Heralds’ Office is practically a
box of puppets.”

“I cannot see,” he repeated, “why you should be thus affected. The
lady was much admired in London; she had great musical talent. I
remember my cousins----”

“Great musical talent!” echoed Mouse bitterly. “Whilst she had her
money, of course, they gave her every talent under heaven!”

She heard in memory the harsh, rude voice of Massarene saying of her
own songs:

“She says yours is bad amatoor music, my lady!”

Oh, how she hated the creature! And to think she was now mistress of
Faldon!

Katherine Massarene mistress of Faldon! It seemed to her an outrage too
intolerable to be borne!

She had never cared to go to Faldon since the time of her marriage
to Cocky; she had always railed against it as the dullest, wildest,
and most out-of-the-way place upon earth. She would have perished of
_ennui_ if she had been forced to pass a week there between its ancient
woods and its solitary seas; but for all that it was the cradle of her
race, the home of her childhood, the house of her mother. To think of
“Billy’s daughter” as reigning there was an utterly unendurable insult!
And the bust by Dalou and the portrait by Orchardson were no doubt gone
there already, and were impudently taking their place in the gallery
where the women of her race were portrayed and where her own portrait
as a child, painted by Millais, hung in the light of the setting sun!

“I cannot see what it matters,” repeated Prince Woffram, turning a
telescope placed on the balustrade above the tea-roses on to a distant
passing yacht.

He had become a very philosophic young man since his marriage.

The quiet common sense of the words fell like mild rain on the raging
fires of her fierce indignation. Perhaps he was right and it did
not matter. Perhaps he was more right than he knew and it was even
advantageous.

If Katherine Massarene had not talked before of what she had found
in her father’s papers she certainly would not talk now. Shameful as
Ronnie’s conduct was, he would not allow his wife to expose his sister.
It was a frightful _mésalliance_, but it had its serviceable side. A
padlock was on the lips of “Billy’s daughter.”

“I will never speak to her if I meet her at Osborne or Windsor,” she
repeated suddenly.

Prince Woffram looked round from the telescope and the tea-roses.

“My angel,” he said very gently, “that would be to argue yourself
unused to royal circles, and it would bring down on you many--many--oh!
many questions.”

“You would have me make advances to this beggared wretch--this scum of
the earth!”

“No, no,” said Prince Woffram soothingly. “I would not suggest to you
to make advances. To make advances is to put oneself in the wrong. I
would suggest to you to await events; and, in the not very probable
coincidence which you imagine, I would beg you to remember that a great
sovereign’s invitation confers a credential which none can dispute.”

Since he had trampled on his conscience, as he had put away his sword,
Wuffie had substituted for them much practical common sense, and in
very bland sentences said things which smote edgeways. His wife at
times wondered how much he guessed, how far he was blinded, and now and
then felt a spasm of fear that this cherub-faced boy, with his artless,
meaningless smile, might, in some things, prove her master.

It is dangerous to teach a man, and a very young man, to sell his soul.
Nature will substitute something else for it, something which you will
not like when you learn to know it well.

She felt that he had fully determined on two things: one, that he would
be well paid; the other, that he would not be compromised. So when she
went into the house she tore up the various infuriated telegrams she
had written in answer to her correspondents, and wrote instead some
prettily-worded intimations that, as she had counseled her brother to
make this marriage when the lady was rich, she could not blame him
for making it now the same lady was poor, and could only hope that
the result would be as fortunate as she sincerely desired for them
both, though circumstances had arisen which unhappily estranged her
from Hurstmanceaux. This way of looking at the matter was at once
so angelic, and so nice and temperate, that it suggested an idea,
which gradually filtered down through her intimate correspondents and
permeated society, the impression, vague but general, that William
Massarene’s daughter had jockeyed her out of some portion of William
Massarene’s fortune. No one could explain how, but everyone thought
so. Daddy Gwyllian did indeed stoutly declare that the impression was
preposterous and untenable, and that if Hurstmanceaux had broken all
relations with his sister he had doubtless very sound reasons for doing
so. But Daddy was waxing old and society was getting tired of him. When
people live too long they outstay the welcome of the world.

With May Harrenden House was again open. The falconer of Clodion
leaned and laughed in silent mirth as the throngs of society passed
up the staircase under his gaze. The Massarenes were like Malbrouck,
_morts et enterrés_, and an Australian wool-stapler reigned in their
stead, worshipped where they had worshipped, and was guarded by their
lares and pénates. Across the threshold, where William Massarene had
been carried lifeless, the great world he had loved flocked, as the
water-fowl on the ponds of the Green Park flock with equal avidity to
be fed, no matter what hand it may be which scatters the bread.

Up that well-known staircase, under the eyes of the nude falconer,
there came a beautiful and very fair woman, who had often been up
those stairs before; a fair and slim and ever blandly-smiling youth
was by her side, who had been told, as children are told in the
nursery, to shut his eyes and open his mouth, and who had done so. He
had been rewarded, for a great many good things had dropped into his
mouth. England had become for him what it is for so many other German
princelings, the Canaan overflowing with milk and honey where he could
enjoy himself at other people’s expense, and lead the first flight on
other people’s horses. She looked about her as she passed on through
the reception-rooms: nothing was changed, nothing of any importance,
and she herself not very much. There were still the same florid Pietro
di Cortona high overhead in the effulgence of the electric lamps, still
the same too dark and dubious Mantegna hanging above a pyramid of
Calla lilies and damask roses. There were only no longer in the alcove
where they had been enshrined the bust by Dalou and the portrait by
Orchardson: they were at Faldon! Insupportable as this idea was to her,
the outrage had its silver side; it meant silence, entire, absolute, on
the part of her brother’s wife.

“Billy--you brute!--I have been stronger than you!” she thought as she
passed the place where the gold vase of Leo the Tenth still filled
the humble office of a samovàr. Life had once more become easy and
agreeable to her. Death had been discriminating and Fortune on the
whole not unkind.

“The poor Massarenes were such dear good friends of mine, but you
have so much more taste than they had,” she said to the Australian
wool-stapler.

And he, a big burly heavy man, who owned many millions of sheep on
many thousands of pastures, and had as much taste as one of his wooly
wethers, was flattered, and thrust out his big paunch, and thought to
himself, under the sorcery of her smile, why should he not succeed
wherever William Massarene had succeeded?

Why not indeed?

THE END.

  A Few Press Opinions on

  A Living Lie

  BY PAUL BOURGET

  _12 mo, Cloth, $1.25; Paper Covers, 50 cents._

=Scotsman=

  Mr. de Vallieres’ translation leaves nothing to be desired, and
  deserves the thanks of English readers for having rendered accessible
  to them a masterpiece of minute analysis of character and feeling.

=Pall Mall Gazette=

  M. Bourget’s celebrated novel ... it is good to find a translation of
  a popular French novel so well done as this is, and the vivid picture
  of Parisian life loses nothing of its force or truth in its English
  dress.

=World=

  “Mensonges” is undoubtedly a clever story, and the present version is
  excellent.

=Vanity Fair=

  The book itself is an education: the very greatest novel of analysis
  and character France has produced since Balzac.

=New York Commercial Advertiser=

  “A Living Lie,” published in this country by Fenno, is one of the
  earlier works of Paul Burget, and one that shows both the weakness
  and strength of his methods. In an introduction written to the
  translation, the author speaks of his humble decipleship of Flaubert
  and Zola, and perhaps none of Bourget’s novels better than this
  recent translation will show better how closely the student has
  followed the masters, especially the former. But one man could write
  “Madame Bovary,” and that was Flaubert, but there are portions of
  “Mensonges” that would lead one to believe that M. Bourget thought
  that he might have written it himself. Madame Bovary’s meeting
  with her lover in a house of ill-fame and Rene’s meetings with his
  mistress might even seem to some as an illustration of where the
  pupil had learned his lesson too well.

  As for the story itself there is no need of rehearsing that. It is
  strong, and viewed from the point of fiction is good. But since M.
  Bourget aspires to be something more than novelist, to be an analyst,
  a psychologist and feminologist, it would be wrong to ignore what
  he considers his best labor. Perhaps it would not be malapropos to
  quote, in relation to M. Bourget’s study of women and women’s mind,
  what Nietzsche has written, that we are puzzled when we try to probe
  women’s mind, not because it is so deep, not because it has no
  bottom--“it is not even shallow.” Which is basely cynical, and anyway
  it was written by a man who is now in a mad house. But, nevertheless,
  it is a good sentence to bear in mind when one is reading the works
  of a feminologist. There is no doubt of M. Bourget’s intuitive
  powers. True, that too frequently does he affirm with unbecoming and
  exultant delight and misplaced passion that two and two are four, but
  often this leads to the higher and more complicated problems, such
  as four and four are eight. Surely M. Bourget is an analyst, but he
  spends too much time analyzing very obvious brick walls.

  But, “A Living Lie” is good fiction, if it is not good literature. It
  is well translated.

  A Few Press Opinions on

  Robert Urquhart

  By GABRIEL SETOUN

  12mo, Cloth, Illustrated, $1.00; Paper Covers, 50 Cents

=The Outlook=

  “Robert Urquhart,” by Gabriel Setoun, is a Scotch story possessing a
  certain degree of strength. Courageous indeed is the writer to-day
  who brings his work in contrast with that of Ian Maclaren, Crockett,
  and J. M. Barrie. Comparison between these masters and the lesser
  lights there cannot be.

=Toledo Blade=

  In “Robert Urquhart,” by Gabriel Setoun, the lovers of Scotch
  stories will experience a delight the same as felt in the reading of
  “The Lilac Sunbonnet,” “Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush,” “The Little
  Minister,” and other novels and tales in which are found tender
  pathos, delicate humor and a dramatic construction. The character of
  old Rob cannot fail to impress all readers, winning their love by
  his simple kindness; while the schoolmaster’s sturdy manliness calls
  forth feeling of liking and respect, with a desire that he shall gain
  his heart’s wish. The story is well worth a reading.

=Sunday Times=

  Lovers of a good story, which is at the same time good literature,
  and especially lovers of the Scotch atmosphere and temperament,
  will enjoy “Robert Urquhart.” This is a new book by Gabriel Setoun,
  published by R. F. Fenno & Company. The central character is a school
  teacher, not the periwig old goose who has so long been strutting,
  conventional to a hair through Scotch stories, but a man of head
  and heart endowments which appeal to the head and the heart for our
  belief, sympathy and love. If Mr. Setoun had not the originality
  to lead the way, he has at least the genius to follow with highest
  credit in the paths of Barrie, Maclaren and Crockett, and who will
  say it is not as hard to follow creditably in beaten paths as to
  charm public fancy with a trifle when it is new?

=Times-Union=

  “Robert Urquhart.” This is an entertaining novel, well written, with
  a good plot and with many of the essentials of a book of the highest
  character. Its pretty binding should also be mentioned, and in this
  it suggests itself as a present to a friend. Its author is Gabriel
  Setoun. It is a Scotch tale. Its pathos is as sweet, its humor as
  delicate, its construction as dramatic and its characters as lovable
  as any to be found in the other Scottish stories which have caught
  the fancy.

=Kansas City Journal=

  An American edition of “Robert Urquhart” will attract the attention
  of many thousands who have read and enjoyed “The Lilac Sunbonnet,”
  “A Galloway Herd,” “Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush,” and “The Little
  Minister” and they will find within its covers a pathos as sweet,
  a humor as delicate a construction as dramatic, and characters as
  lovable as are to be found in any of the above-mentioned works.

  A Few Press Opinions on

  The Professor’s Experiment

  By MRS. HUNGERFORD (The Duchess)

  12mo, Cloth, $1.25; Paper Covers, 50 Cents

=The Watchman=

  “The ‘experiment,’ which gives name to the story, is a weird one and
  picturesquely presented, reminding one faintly of the old French
  story of the ‘Broken Ear.’ It turns the red light briskly on the
  hero and heroine, who, having been thus vividly introduced to us and
  to each other, proceed to the business of the occasion by falling
  in love with each other and entangling themselves in divers nets
  of embarrassing circumstances, settling away from the storm to a
  peaceful horizon of marriage at last. It has become necessary, in
  these days, to indicate the exceptional and welcome fact that this
  is a pure story; painting cheery pictures of normal domestic life,
  and opening no side doors to encourage the stealthy adventures of a
  prurient fancy. It is a novel, strictly speaking, involving neither
  sermon nor stump speech. It offers entertainment only, but it gives
  what it offers; resting the tired brain and leaving no poison in the
  blood.”

=Evening Bulletin=

  “It is a capital story of an Irish savant, who, like the magicians
  of mediæval days, passed his years in concocting a draught to put
  his subjects to sleep. Fortunately a beautiful girl of eighteen
  is found insensible on the professor’s doorstep. She becomes his
  patient, enters upon a long sleep, and, in the ‘large awakening,’
  learns that she is heiress to an immense fortune and the professor’s
  granddaughter.”

=Indianapolis Journal=

  “‘The Professor’s Experiment’ is the title of a new book by Mrs.
  Hungerford (The Duchess). It is of a somewhat more elaborate and
  ambitious character than this writer’s recent stories, and shows
  a return to her earlier manner. The heroine is the impulsive,
  warm-hearted young Irish girl with whom all Mrs. Hungerford’s
  readers are well acquainted, but of whom, in her various phases and
  reappearances they do not tire.”

  A Few Press Opinions on

  The Unclassed

  By GEORGE GISSING

  12mo, Cloth, Illustrated, $1.25; Paper Covers, 50 Cents

=Outlook=

  It shows remarkable powers of observation and realistic reproduction
  of certain phases of life. It deals with the life of the “unclassed”
  very bluntly, and with unnecessary detail, but there is no intention
  to pervert morals.

=Boston Post=

  The story is full of strong and telling situations, a story in which
  the realism often impinges closely upon the ideal. In many places the
  book is absorbing in its interest.

=N. Y. Advertiser=

  It is a story of the struggling ones, struggling against and for
  class distinction; struggling to keep from going down into the
  “lowest class;” struggling to reach the class where bread and butter
  are not the only living cries.

=Buffalo Commercial=

  Mr. Gissing has secured a place in the front rank of the best English
  novelists, and any story of which he is the author will be widely
  and eagerly read. “The Unclassed” is a thrilling, intensely dramatic
  story.

=Meadville Stylus=

  Ida Starr is a child of ten years when the story opens. It closes
  with her marriage. We are permitted to observe her character in
  all the stages of its development from a childhood all love and
  gentleness, through a solitary and defenseless girlhood spent in
  a desperate struggle against the poverty that ends in starvation,
  through her temptation, her fall, and her redemption through love.
  There are, curiously enough, no traces of the influence of the
  naturalistic school in Mr. Gissing’s work. The entire story is
  planned and wrought out with the greatest imaginable delicacy.

  A Few Press Opinions on

  Uncle Scipio

  BY MRS. JEANNETTE H. WALWORTH

  _12mo, Cloth, $1.25; Paper Covers, 50 Cents_

=Public Opinion=

  A very effective story of the reconstruction days in Mississippi
  is Mrs. Jeannette H. Walworth’s “Uncle Scipio.” It is bright and
  healthy, with a well devised plot, full of incident and entertaining.
  Stories based on those days of fermentation are not at all rare, but
  Mrs. Walworth, being a transplanted Northener, has been able to take,
  not a dispassionate view, but that of a warm-hearted, clear-headed
  woman. Her novel, however, is by no means a political argument; the
  time is in the early seventies, and the situation which then existed
  in the South is merely a background for a good story, which is about
  the best Mrs. Walworth has written.

=Courier=

  Mrs. Walworth’s stories of Southern and negro life are vivaciously
  characteristic of people and scenes of that portion of our country,
  and they reveal charming pictures of a variety of types, grave and
  gay. This is a love story, set in the gay picturesque Mississippi
  Valley, describing the conditions that prevailed immediately after
  the war of the rebellion. Mrs. Walworth is a Southerner by adoption,
  and she is thus enabled to give us a true and sympathetic insight
  that is certain to please and at the same time instruct.

=Commercial Advertiser=

  Mrs. J. H. Walworth has already some celebrity as a story writer.
  “Uncle Scipio,” which has made its appearance fresh from her pen,
  is a love tale, set in the picturesque Mississippi Valley. As a
  Northern woman the writer finds much in the country of her adoption,
  immediately following the civil war, to strike her with peculiar
  force. She is thus enabled to give a true and sympathetic insight
  that is certain to please and at the same time instruct. “Uncle
  Scipio,” the hero of the story, is a dear old negro slave of the
  Uncle Tom variety, for whom the reader is bound to form a genuine
  admiration and attachment before he lays down the book.

=Post=

  A love story set in the Mississippi Valley, describing the conditions
  that prevailed immediately after the War of the Rebellion. Mrs.
  Walworth is a Southerner by adoption, and she is thus enabled to give
  us a true and sympathetic insight that is certain to please and at
  the same time instruct. Uncle Scipio is a dear old negro slave that
  you are sure to become attached to before the volume is laid aside.

=Plain Dealer=

  Mrs. J. H. Walworth’s “Uncle Scipio” is a story of the South the
  time of which is the reconstruction period but the action had its
  beginning in the ante-war days and was shaped by the events of the
  great struggle. “Uncle Scipio” is the old negro whose reminiscent
  gossip with the visiting agent of a Northern land syndicate brings
  out the story which Mrs. Walworth narrates with the skill of a
  practical novelist.

R. F. FENNO & CO., 112 Fifth Ave., N. Y.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Emboldened text is surrounded by equals signs: =bold=.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

  Dialect and non-English words are transcribed as printed except for
    obvious errors which have been corrected.