Those five years had made a different man of Jack Clare—­had brought him financial prosperity, success in his art, and contentment with life.  He was now twenty-seven, clean-shaven, and with the build of an athlete; and his attractive, well-cut features had fulfilled the promise of youth.  But for six wretched months, after that bitter night when Diane fled from him, he had suffered acutely.  In vain his friends, none of whom could give him any clew to his betrayer, sought to comfort him; in vain he searched for trace of tidings of his wife, for her faithlessness had not utterly crushed his love, and the recollections of the first months of his marriage were very sweet to him.  The chains with which the dancer of the Folies Bergere bound him had been strong; his hot youth had fallen victim to the charms of a face and figure that would have enslaved more experienced men.

But the healing power of time works wonders, and in the spring of the succeeding year, when Paris burst into leaf and blossom, Jack began to take a fresh interest in life, and to realize with a feeling little short of satisfaction that Diane’s desertion was all for the best, and that he was well rid of a woman who must ultimately have dragged him down to her own level.  The sale of his mother’s London residence, a narrow little house in Bayswater, put him in possession of a fairly large sum of money.  He left Paris with his friend Jimmie Drexell, and the two spent a year in Italy, Holland and Algeria, doing pretty hard work in the way of sketching.  Jack returned to Paris quite cured, and with a determination to win success in his calling.  He saw Drexell off for his home in New York, and then he packed up his belongings—­they had been under lock and key in a room of the house on the Boulevard St. Germain—­and emigrated to London.  His great sorrow was only an unpleasant memory to him now.  He had friends in England, but no relations there or anywhere, so far as he knew.  His father, an artist of unappreciated talent, had died twenty years before.  It was after his death that Jack’s mother had come into some property from a distant relative.

Taking his middle name of Vernon, Jack settled in Fitzroy Square.  A couple of hundred pounds constituted his worldly wealth.  His ambition was to be a great painter, but he had other tastes as well, and his talent lay in more than one channel.  Within a year, by dint of hard work, he obtained more than a foothold.  He had sold a couple of pictures to dealers; his black-and-white drawings were in demand with a couple of good magazines, and a clever poster, bearing his name, and advertising a popular whisky was displayed all over London.  Then, picking up a French paper in the Monico one morning, he experienced a shock.  The body of a woman had been found in the Seine and taken to the Morgue, where several persons unhesitatingly identified her as Diane Merode, the one-time fascinating dancer of the Folies Bergere.