“Madame, I know it.”

“But it is a position of which I have the command, and which no one understands so well as myself.  To attempt to help me, would be to add to my embarrassments.  For this reason it is well that Captain Dalrymple is not here.  His presence just now in Paris could do no good—­on the contrary, would be certain to do harm.  Do you follow my meaning, Monsieur Arbuthnot?”

“I understand what you say, Madame; but....”

“But you do not quite understand why I say it? Eh bien, Monsieur, when you write to Captain Dalrymple.... for you write sometimes, do you not?”

“Often, Madame.”

“Then, when you write, say nothing that may add to his anxieties.  If you have reason at any time to suppose that I am importuned to do this or that; that I am annoyed; that I have my own battle to fight—­still, for his sake as well as for mine, be silent.  It is my own battle, and I know how to fight it.”

“Alas!  Madame....”

She smiled sadly.

“Nay,” she said, “I have more courage than you would suppose; more courage and more will.  I am fully capable of bearing my own burdens; and Captain Dalrymple has already enough of his own.  Now tell me something of yourself.  You are here, I think, to study medicine.  Are you greatly devoted to your work?  Have you many friends?”

“I study, Madame—­not always very regularly; and I have one friend.”

“An Englishman?”

“No, Madame—­a German.”

“A fellow-student, I presume.”

“No, Madame—­an artist.”

“And you are very happy here?”

“I have occupations and amusements; therefore, if to be neither idle nor dull is to be happy.  I suppose I am happy.”

“Nay,” she said quickly, “be sure of it.  Do not doubt it.  Who asks more from Fate courts his own destruction.”

“But it would be difficult, Madame, to go through life without desiring something better, something higher—­without ambition, for instance—­without love.”

“Ambition and love!” she repeated, smiling sadly.  “There speaks the man.  Ambition first—­the aim and end of life; love next—­the pleasant adjunct to success!  Ah, beware of both.”

“But without either, life would be a desert.”

“Life is a desert,” she replied, bitterly.  “Ambition is its mirage, ever beckoning, ever receding—­love its Dead Sea fruit, fair without and dust within.  You look surprised.  You did not expect such gloomy theories from me—­yet I am no cynic.  I have lived; I have suffered; I am a woman—­voila tout.  When you are a few years older, and have trodden some of the flinty ways of life, you will see the world as I see it.”

“It may be so, Madame; but if life is indeed a desert, it is, at all events, some satisfaction to know that the dwellers in tents become enamored of their lot, and, content with what the desert has to give, desire no other.  It is only the neophyte who rides after the mirage and thirsts for the Dead Sea apple.”