“When friendship between man and woman is a feeble little fellow, he goes free, but when he grows very strong, then his lot was not so easy in other days.  You understand me?”

“I’m sure I don’t, but what matter?” she laughed.  Carlos shrugged his shoulders.

“Yes, what matter?” he murmured.  “As long as we can be together, why should we seek names for our companionship?  It is—­what it is.”

Yet Loraine, still sure of her future, spelling a congenial and luxurious life with Paul, understood what she pretended not to understand.  The Duke de Metuan was not a riddle to her; not even a figure tinged with mystery.  His wife was an unlovely invalid.  Her sole value was monetary, and the duke’s hints and thoughts had all to do with an arrangement wherein life should yield him the compensating delights which his family denied.

Loraine’s fastidiousness rather shuddered at this idea, yet perhaps a certain sort of character disintegration had set in, with her first cutting loose the moorings of preconceived standards.  Possibly it was working a more rapid atrophy than she knew.  She told herself that, in her exile, Carlos made a rather diverting companion, and that since she understood his purpose she could with ease control the situation.  He should amuse and no more.  If his hints became less ambiguous than she found agreeable, she would send him packing, but meanwhile she would permit his luncheons and his motors to serve her.  The food and roads about Nice are excellent—­and expensive.

CHAPTER XXVIII

There is in the western hemisphere one town whose local news is national news and international news.  Its celebrities wear names which the nation mouths over with gusto, and its own name was, until comparatively recently, New Amsterdam.  The country closely followed the first-column stories with which the press sought to keep abreast of the affairs of Hamilton Montagu Burton.  It was interesting reading, for it dealt with a late potentate of power untold; now an invalid whose brain slept like a child taking its forenoon nap while his millions, counted in scores and hundreds, went back to their sources as the sun draws water into the clouds to spill it out again elsewhere.  A giant of untold might had kindled the fires that slept at the heart of a volcano—­and then had fallen asleep upon the slopes down which the lava must flow!

While he slept, Ruin, spelling itself with a capital letter, had signaled out the one pedestaled figure which had laughed at ruin, and mocked its potency and bragged of a star which was above menace.

Hamilton Burton lay for weeks in insensibility and delirium and when, in returned consciousness, he realized his predicament he raved like a madman against restraint, counting the precious moments, which were being used against him, bleeding him of vital power.  This very fretting against the inevitable burdened him with a waste of nerve and brain which should send him forth, depleted in strength and weakened in resistance, to meet his adversaries.