“True!  Forgive me.  But you should not suggest a thing that you know to be impossible.”

“Pardon, madame!  I was thinking of the many impossibilities performed in a good cause!”

“Say no more, Jacqueline!  To-night was to-night!  To-night is over!” She walked across the room and passed out upon the balcony, leaning over the railing at the spot where Blake had stood.

Jacqueline, swift and guileful, was instantly beside her.

“Madame, at its most serious, to-night was a little comedy.  Is it so criminal to repeat a little comedy—­once, or even twice—­in a good cause?  It is not as if madame were not sure of herself!  Besides, the comedy was charming!”

“Yes; the comedy was charming!” Maxine echoed the sentiment, and in her heart called ‘charming’ a poor word.  “But even if I were weak, Jacqueline,” she added, “how could I banish Max?  Max could scarcely continue to have important business.”

“Perhaps not, madame; but Monsieur Max might continue to display temper!  Do not forget that he and Monsieur Edouard did not part upon the friendliest terms.”

Maxine smiled.

“But even granted that, I could not be here again—­alone.”

Jacqueline, with airiest scorn, tossed the words aside.

“That, madame?  Why, that arranges itself!  The princess loves her brother!  His quarrel is her grief.  Is not woman always compassionate?”

The tone was irresistible.  Maxine laughed.  “Jacqueline, you were the Serpent in Adam’s Garden!  There is not a doubt of it!  No wonder poor M. Cartel has taken so big a bite of the Apple.”

She laughed again, and Jacqueline laughed too, in mischievous delight.

“Madame!” she coaxed.  “Madame!”

“No!” said Maxine, with eyes fixed determinately upon the lights of the city; while somewhere above her in the cool, clear starlight, a hidden voice—­her own, and not her own—­whispered a subtle ‘Yes!’

CHAPTER XXIX

The universe is compounded of the miraculous; but love is the miracle of miracles.  Again the impossible had been contrived; again Maxine and Blake were standing together on the balcony.  The Parisian night seemed as still as a held breath, and as palpitating with human possibilities; the domes of the Sacre-Coeur loomed white against the sky, dumb witnesses to the existence of the spirit.  The scene was undoubtedly poetic; yet, placed in the noisiest highway of London or the most desolate bog-land of Blake’s native country, these two would have been as truly and amply cognizant of the real and the ideal; for the cloak of love was about them, the vapor of love was before their eyes, and for the hour, although they knew it not, they were capable of reconstructing a whole world from the material in their own hearts.

But they were divinely ignorant; they each tricked themselves with the age-old fallacy of a unique position, each wandered onward in the dream-like fields of romance, content to believe that the other knew the hidden way.