“You are not going to reinstate your sentence of banishment, Marcia?  You can’t know what this evening has meant to me.  A man must have in his life that comfort that only a woman like you can give.  Surely you will give it.”

“But, Paul,” she said as gently as she would have argued with a child, “you must remember.  There is a woman:  a woman to whom you regard yourself pledged.  Are you being very loyal to her?  Are you being very loyal to either of us?”

To herself she added:  “A woman whom I have never seen and whose battles I am called upon to fight.”

“She’s in Europe.”  Paul spoke rather sullenly, and though he said no more his voice intimated that so far as he was concerned she might remain there.

Marcia nodded her bend.  “She is there to get a divorce—­so that she can marry you.  No, Paul, you know why I sent you away in the first place.  Since then nothing has changed—­unless it is that I see more clearly the fatality of drifting.  I can’t do it.”

“And you—­” he spoke somewhat brokenly—­“doesn’t it mean anything to you?”

Suddenly and momentarily her self-restraint broke.

“Mean anything to me!” she exclaimed passionately as her eyes widened and her whole attitude relaxed into a posture of collapse in her chair.  “Mean anything—!” Then suddenly she straightened up and passed a hand across her brow as though to brush away a cloud that rested there.  In a composed voice she added:  “It means so much that you must do as I say, not merely until you feel like disobeying again, but always.”  After a long silence she rose.  “I must get up early,” she said, remembering that tomorrow brought its program of a train journey, a matinee and an evening performance.

“Paul,” said Marcia as they walked back, “I have to leave a call for seven and catch a train at eight-thirty.  There’s no use in your getting up.  No, please don’t, and please don’t hunt me out again.”  At the door of the hotel she said enigmatically, “What a wonderful balance Nature might have struck between your brother’s strength and your—­winning personality.  Good-night.”

* * * * *

The Duke de Metuan’s failure to rehabilitate his impaired fortunes with Burton gold had left a more durable scar upon his optimism than any of the similar scars of the past.  Mary Burton had been such a splendid combination of charm and opulence that a marriage with her would have made a pleasure of necessity.  The Duke in his earlier stages of disappointment had felt first the pangs of a lover, and only in secondary degree the chagrin of a depleted exchequer.  Several months had found him inconsolable, and when desperation had closed upon him he had wedded an estimable lady whose wealth was less dazzling than Mary’s, but ample none the less.  Her personal paucity of allurement was a handicap which his philosophy ignored as much as possible.  In private he sometimes made a fastidious grimace, and accepted the inevitable.