“Madame!”

“Hide me!” cried Maxine.

“Madame!”

“Lock the outer door!  And if M. Blake should knock—­”

Jacqueline made no further comment.  When a visitor’s face is blanched and her limbs tremble as did those of Maxine, the Jacquelines of this world neither question nor hesitate.  She went across the room without a word, and the key clicked in the lock.

Maxine was standing in the middle of the room when Jacqueline returned; her body was still quivering, her nostrils fluttering, her fingers twisting and intertwisting in an excess of emotion; and at sight of the familiar little figure, words broke from her with the fierceness of a freed torrent.

“Jacqueline!  You see before you a mad woman!  A mad woman—­and one filled with the fear of her madness!  They say the insane are mercifully oblivious.  It is untrue!” She almost cried the last words and, turning, began a swift pacing of the room.

“Madame!” Jacqueline caught her breath at her own daring.  “Madame, you know at last, then, that he loves you?”

Maxine stopped and her burning eyes fixed themselves upon the girl.  This speech of Jacqueline’s was a breach of all their former relations, but her brain had no room for pride.  She was grappling with vital facts.

“I know at last that he loves me?” she repeated, confusedly.

“That he loves you, madame; that, unknowingly, he has always loved you.  How else could he have treated Monsieur Max so sacredly—­almost as he might have treated his own child?”

But Maxine was not dealing in psychological subtleties.

“Love!” she cried out.  “Love!  All the world is in a conspiracy over this love!”

“Because love is the only real thing, madame.”

“Perhaps!  But not the love of which you speak.  The love of the soul, but not the love of the body!”

“Madame, can one truly give the soul and refuse the body?  Is not the instinct of love to give all?”

The little Jacqueline spoke her truth with a frail confidence very touching to behold.  She was a child of the people, her sole weapons against the world were a certain blonde beauty, a certain engaging youthfulness; but she looked Maxine steadfastly in the eyes, meeting the anger, the scorn, the fear compassed in her glance.

“I know the world, madame; it is not a pretty place.  When I was sixteen years old, I left my parents because it called to me—­and in the distance its voice was pleasant.  I left my home; I had lovers.”  She shrugged her shoulders with an extreme philosophy.  “I tried everything—­except love.  Then—­I met Lucien!” Her philosophy merged curiously to innocence, almost to the soft innocence of a child.  “I ran away again, madame; I fled to Lize.”  She paused.  “Poor Lize!  She has a good heart!  That was the night at the Bal Tabarin.  That night Lucien opened his arms, and I flung myself into them.”

She spoke with perfect artlessness, ignorant of a world other than her own, innocent of a moral code other than that which she followed.