Title:  Max

Author:  Katherine Cecil Thurston

Release Date:  November 15, 2004 [EBook #14054]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

*** Start of this project gutenberg EBOOK Max ***

Produced by Rick Niles, John Hagerson, Stephanie Fleck and the PG
Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

[Illustration:  “I have waited all my life for this”]

MAX

A NOVEL

By
Katherine Cecil Thurston

Author of
“The masquerader”
“The Gambler” Etc.

ILLUSTRATED BY FRANK CRAIG

Harper & Brothers publishers
new York and London
MCMX

Published September, 1910.

ILLUSTRATIONS

“I have waited all my life for this”

STANDING AGAIN IN THE OUTER COURT OF A HOUSE IN PETERSBURG

TWO SOULS, DRAWN TOGETHER, TOUCHED IN A FIRST SUBTLE FUSION

“Why, boy, this is clever—­clever—­clever!”

THE IMPRESSION OF A MYSTERY FLOWED BACK UPON HIM

“Look!  This is what I shall do.  This!”

THE COMPLETE SEMBLANCE OF THE WOMAN

“C’EST LA VIE!  L’ETERNELLE, LA TOUTE-PUISSANTE VIE!”

PART I

MAX

CHAPTER I

A night journey is essentially a thing of possibilities.  To those who count it as mere transit, mere linking of experiences, it is, of course, a commonplace; but to the imaginative, who by gift divine see a picture in every cloud, a story behind every shadow, it suggests romance—­romance in the very making.

Such a vessel of inspiration was the powerful north express as it thundered over the sleeping plains of Germany and France on its night journey from Cologne to Paris.  A thing of possibilities indeed, with its varying human freight—­stolid Teutons, hard-headed Scandinavians, Slavs whom expediency or caprice had forced to descend upon Paris across the sea of ice.  It was the month of January, and an unlikely and unlovely night for long and arduous travel.  There were few pleasure-passengers on the express, and if one could have looked through the carriage windows, blurred with damp mist, one would have seen upon almost every face the look—­resigned or resolute—­of