“Oh, I could wish myself dead!”

“And why?”

“Because I have made myself an imbecile!”

The humiliation, the self-contempt were so candid, so human, that something changed in Max’s face and the icy rigidity of pose relaxed.

“Come here!”

The guilty child to the life, Jacqueline came timidly across the room, the candlestick still drooping unhappily from her right hand, the mysterious mug clutched in her left.

Max’s first action was to take possession of both, and to set them side by side upon the dressing-table.  The candle Jacqueline delivered up in silence, but as the mug was wrested from her, she cried out in sudden vindictiveness: 

“And that—­look you—­that is the cause of all!  It was Lucien’s idea!  I served a cup of bouillon to him and to his friend at midnight, for they had talked much; and finding it good, nothing would serve but I must place a cup also for Monsieur Max, to await him on his return.  Alas!  Alas!”

Max pushed the cup away, as if to remove a side issue.

“Answer the question I put to you!  You know that I am a woman?”

“Yes; I know.”

“Since when?  Since the night at the Bal Tabarin?”

“Oh, but no!”

“Since the morning we met upon this doorstep?”

“No.”

“Since the morning you made the coffee for M. Blake and me?”

Jacqueline was twisting the buckle of her belt in nervous perturbation.

“Answer me!  It was since that morning?”

“No!  Yes!  Oh, it was before that morning.  Oh, madame—­monsieur!” She wrung her hands in a confusion of misery.  “Oh, do not torture me!  I cannot tell you how it was—­or when.  I cannot explain.  You know how these things come—­from here!” She lightly touched the place where she imagined her heart to be.

Max, sitting quiet, made no betrayal of the agony of apprehension at work within.

“And how many others have had this—­instinct?  M. Cartel?  M. Blake?”

So surprising, so grotesque seemed the questions, that self-confidence rushed suddenly in upon Jacqueline.  She threw back her head and laughed—­laughed until her old inconsequent self was restored to power.

“Lucien!  Monsieur Edouard!  Oh, la, la!  How droll!”

“Then they do not know?”

“Know?  Are they not men?  And are men not children?”

The vast superiority—­the wordly wisdom in the babyish face was at once so comical and so reassuring that irresistibly Max laughed too; and at the laugh, the little Jacqueline dropped to her knees beside the dressing-table and looked up, smiling, radiant.

“I am forgiven?”

“I suppose so!”

“Then grant me a favor—­one favor!  Permit me to touch the beautiful hair!”

Without waiting for the permission, the eager little hands caught up the coiled strands, and in a moment the candlelight was again chasing the red tints and the bronze through the dark waves.