Man is too thoroughly an egoist not to be also an egotist; if he love, the object shall know it.  During a lifetime he may conceal it through stress of expediency and honour, but it shall bubble from his dying lips, though it disrupt a neighbourhood.  It is known, however, that most men do not wait so long to disclose their passion.  In the case of Lorison, his particular ethics positively forbade him to declare his sentiments, but he must needs dally with the subject, and woo by innuendo at least.

On this night, after the usual meal at the Carabine d’Or, he strolled with his companion down the dim old street toward the river.

The Rue Chartres perishes in the old Place d’Armes.  The ancient Cabildo, where Spanish justice fell like hail, faces it, and the Cathedral, another provincial ghost, overlooks it.  Its centre is a little, iron-railed park of flowers and immaculate gravelled walks, where citizens take the air of evenings.  Pedestalled high above it, the general sits his cavorting steed, with his face turned stonily down the river toward English Turn, whence come no more Britons to bombard his cotton bales.

Often the two sat in this square, but to-night Lorison guided her past the stone-stepped gate, and still riverward.  As they walked, he smiled to himself to think that all he knew of her—­except that be loved her—­was her name, Norah Greenway, and that she lived with her brother.  They had talked about everything except themselves.  Perhaps her reticence had been caused by his.

They came, at length, upon the levee, and sat upon a great, prostrate beam.  The air was pungent with the dust of commerce.  The great river slipped yellowly past.  Across it Algiers lay, a longitudinous black bulk against a vibrant electric haze sprinkled with exact stars.

The girl was young and of the piquant order.  A certain bright melancholy pervaded her; she possessed an untarnished, pale prettiness doomed to please.  Her voice, when she spoke, dwarfed her theme.  It was the voice capable of investing little subjects with a large interest.  She sat at ease, bestowing her skirts with the little womanly touch, serene as if the begrimed pier were a summer garden.  Lorison poked the rotting boards with his cane.

He began by telling her that he was in love with some one to whom he durst not speak of it.  “And why not?” she asked, accepting swiftly his fatuous presentation of a third person of straw.  “My place in the world,” he answered, “is none to ask a woman to share.  I am an outcast from honest people; I am wrongly accused of one crime, and am, I believe, guilty of another.”