Silence was maintained until the wine was brought; then she drank thirstily, laid down her empty glass and turned her eyes upon him.

“You have parted with your friend, eh?”

The surprise of the question was so sharp that it killed speculation.  He did not ask how she had probed his secret—­whether by mere intuition or through some feminine confidence of Jacqueline’s.  The fact of her knowledge swept him beyond the region of lucid thought; he accepted the situation as it was offered.

“Yes,” he said.  “I have parted with my friend.”

“And why?  He is a good boy—­Blake!” She looked at him with her inscrutable eyes, and after many days he was conscious of the touch of human compassion.  He did not analyze the woman’s feelings—­he did not even conjecture whether she knew him for boy or girl.  All he comprehended was that out of this sordid atmosphere—­out of the lethargy of the sultry night—­some force had touched him, some force was drawing him back into the circle of human things.  Strange indeed are the workings of the mind.  He, who had shrunk with an agonized sensitiveness from the sympathy of M. Cartel—­from the tender comprehension of the little Jacqueline—­suddenly felt his reserve melt and break in presence of this woman of the boulevards with her air of impassive ennui.  Theoretically, he knew life in all its harder aspects, and it called for no vivid imagination to trace the descent of the fresh grisette of the Quartier Latin to the creature who sought her meals in the Cafe des Cerises-jumelles, yet hers was the accepted compassion.

“Madame!” he said, suddenly.  “Madame, tell me!  You knew him once?”

Lize wiped the dew of heat from her forehead; emptied a second glass of wine.  “A thousand years ago, mon petit, when the world was as young as you!”

“In the Quartier?”

“In the Quartier—­on the Boul’ Mich’—­at Bulliers—­” She stopped, falling into a dream; then, suddenly, from the farthest corner of the room, came the sound of a loud kiss, and the boy and girl at the distant table began to sing in unison—­a ribald song, but instinct with the zest of life.  Lize started, as though she had been struck.

“They have it—­youth!” she cried, with a jerk of her head toward the distant corner.  “The world is for them!” Then her voice and her expression altered.  She leaned across the table, until her face was close to Max.

“What a little fool you are!” she said.  “It is written in those eyes of yours—­that see too little and see too much.  Go home!  Think of what I have said!  He is a good boy—­this Blake!”

Max mechanically replenished her glass, and mechanically she drank; then she produced a little mirror and made good the ravages of the heat upon her face with the nonchalance of her kind; finally, she looked at the clock.

“Come!” she said.  “We go the same way.”