“Oh, no, excellency!” she cried earnestly.

“She is very close-mouthed, sahib,” added Selim, with conviction.

“We’ll take Bowles to England with us next week,” went on Chase dreamily.  “We’ll leave Japat to take care of itself.  I don’t know which it is in most danger of, seismic or Semitic disturbances.”

He lighted a fresh cigarette, tenderly fingering it before applying the match.

“I’ll smoke one of hers to-night, Selim.  See!  I keep them apart from the others, in this little gold case.  I smoke them only when I am thinking.  Now, run in and tell Mr. Bowles that I said he was a Tray.  I want to be alone.”

They left him and he threw himself upon the green sod, his back to a tree, his face toward the distant chateau.  Hours afterward the faithful Selim came out to tell him that it was bedtime.  He found his master still sitting there, looking across the moonlit flat in the direction of a place in the hills where once he had dwelt in marble halls.

“Selim,” he said, arising and laying his hand upon his servant’s shoulder, his voice unsteady with finality, “I have decided, after all, to go to Paris!  We will live there, Selim.  Do you understand?” with strange fierceness, a great exultation mastering him.  “We are to live in Paris!”

To himself, all that night, he was saying:  “I must see her again—­I shall see her!”

A thousand times he had read and re-read the letter that Lady Deppingham had written to him just before the ceremony in the cathedral at Thorberg.  He knew every word that it contained; he could read it in the dark.  She had said that Genevra was going into a hell that no hereafter could surpass in horrors!  And that was ages ago, it seemed to him.  Genevra had been a wife for nearly three months—­the wife of a man she loathed; she was calling in her heart for him to come to her; she was suffering in that unspeakable hell.  All this he had come to feel and shudder over in his unspeakable loneliness.  He would go to her!  There could be no wrong in loving her, in being near her, in standing by her in those hours of desperation.

A copy of a London newspaper, stuffed away in the recesses of his trunk, dated June 29th, had come to him by post.  It contained the telegraphic details of the brilliant wedding in Thorberg.  He had read the names of the guests over and over again with a bitterness that knew no bounds.  Those very names proved to him that her world was not his, nor ever could be.  Every royal family in Europe was represented; the list of noble names seemed endless to him—­the flower of the world’s aristocracy.  How he hated them!

The next morning Selim aroused him from his fitful sleep, bringing the news that a strange vessel had arrived off Aratat.  Chase sprang out of bed, possessed of the wild hope that the opportunity to leave the island had come sooner than he had expected.  He rushed out upon his veranda, overlooking the little harbour.