Blake looked up.  “Do you know,” he said, irrelevantly and a little dreamily, “do you know that is just the speech I could imagine issuing from the lips of your picture!  Tell me something of this mysterious sister of yours; I’ve been patient until now.”

Max drew back into the darkness.

“Of my sister?  There is nothing to tell!”

“Nonsense!  There’s always something to tell.  It’s the sense of a story behind things that keeps half of us alive.  Come!  I’ve spun you many a yarn.”  With the quiet air of the man who means to have his way, he took out and lighted a cigar.

“Come, boy!  I’m listening!”

Max had turned back to the railing, and once more he leaned out into the night; but now his eyes were for the meshed lights of the city and no longer for the stars, his restlessness had heightened to excitement, his heart seemed to beat in his throat.  The temptation to make confession, to make confession here, isolated in the midst of the world, with the friend of his soul for confessor, caught him with the urgency of an embracing gale.  To lay himself bare, and yet retain his garments!  His head swam, as he yielded to the suggestion.

“There is nothing to tell!” he said again.

“That’s admitted!  All the best stories begin that way.”

Max laughed and took a cigarette from his pocket.  His nerves were tingling, his blood racing to the thought of the precipice upon which he stood.  One false step and the fabric of his existence was imperilled!  The adventurer awoke in him alive and alert.

“She intrigues you, then—­Maxine?”

“Marvellously—­as the Sphinx intrigues me!  To begin with, why the name?  You Max!  She Maxine!”

For an instant Max scanned the dark plantation with knitted brows; then he looked over his shoulder with a peculiar smile.

“We are twins, mon cher!” he said, taking secret joy in the elaboration of his lie.  “My mother was a Frenchwoman, by name Maxine, and when she died at our birth, my father in his grief bestowed the name upon us both—­the boy and the girl—­Max and Maxine!” Very carefully he lighted his cigarette.  His whole nature was quivering to the dangers of this masked confession—­this dancing upon the edge of the precipice.  “My father was a man of ideas!” He carefully threw the match down into the rue Mueller.

“Your father, I take it, was a personage of importance?” Blake was momentarily sarcastic.

“A personage, yes,” the boy admitted, “but that is not the point.  The point is that he was a man of ideas, who understood the body and the soul.  A man who trained a child in every outdoor sport until it was one with nature, and then taught it to entrap nature and bend her to the uses of art.  He was very great—­my father!”

“He is dead?”

“Yes; he is dead.  He died the year before Maxine married.”

“Ah, she married?” Absurd as it might seem, there was a fleeting shadow of disappointment discernible in Blake’s voice.