M. Ferraud was charmed.  He was voluble.  Never had he entered a more homelike place, large enough to be called a chateau, yet as cheerful as a writer’s fire.  And the daughter!  Her French was the elegant speech of Tours, her German Hanoverian.  Incomparable!  And she was not married? Helas!  How many luckless fellows walked the world desolate?  And this was M. Fitzgerald the journalist?  And M. Breitmann had also been one?  How delighted he was to be here!  All this flowed on with perfect naturalness; there wasn’t a false note anywhere.  At dinner he diffused a warmth and geniality which were infectious.  Laura was pleased and amused; and she adored her father for these impulses which brought to the board, unexpectedly, such men as M. Ferraud.

M. Ferraud did not smoke, but he dissipated to the extent of drinking three small cups of coffee after dinner.

“You are right,” he acknowledged—­there had been a slight dispute relative to the methods of roasting the berry—­“Europe does not roast its coffee, it burns it.  The aroma, the bouquet!  I am beaten.”

“So am I,” Fitzgerald reflected sadly, snatching a vision of the girl’s animated face.

Three days he had ridden into the country with her, or played tennis, or driven down to the village and inspected the yacht.  He had been lonely so long and this beautiful girl was such a good comrade.  One moment he blessed the prospective treasure hunt, another he execrated it.  To be with this girl was to love her; and whither this pleasurable idleness would lead him he was neither blind nor self-deceiving.  But with the semi-humorous recklessness which was the leaven of his success, he thrust prudence behind him and stuck to the primrose path.  He had played with fire before, but never had the coals burned so brightly.  He did not say that she was above him; mentally and by birth they were equals; simply, he was compelled to admit of the truth that she was beyond him.  Money.  That was the obstacle.  For what man will live on his wife’s bounty?  Suppose they found the treasure (and with his old journalistic suspicion he was still skeptical), and divided it; why, the interest on his share would not pay for her dresses.  To the ordinary male eye her gowns looked inexpensive, but to him who had picked up odd bits of information not usually in the pathway of man, to him there was no secret about it.  That bodice and those sleeves of old Venetian point would have eaten up the gains of any three of his most prosperous months.

And Breitmann, dropping occasionally the ash of his cigarette on the tray, he, too, was pondering.  But his German strain did not make it so easy for him as for Fitzgerald to give concrete form to his thought.  The star, as he saw it, had a nebulous appearance.