There was no strain of iron in this woman’s soul, and that suited his purpose.  Just now he would gain more by merely standing by.  Her increasing alarm would one day turn to panic and she would lose her head.  For that day he could afford to wait.

Loraine was undergoing an agony, and when the time came which the duke regarded as the psychological moment, and he baldly offered her his proposition, she made a lovely picture of a woman in distress converted into a righteous fury.

She sent him away with blazing eyes and words that should have scorched, and he went with a shrug of the shoulders and smiled when he was out of sight.  “It is not for long,” he told himself.

In that cynical conviction Carlos de Metuan was correct.  Loraine tried poverty and loneliness for a while in Paris, and because she was still a creature of rare beauty, several other men with greater or less degree of skilled language suggested similar solutions.

At last she met the duke again.  He had been in Andalusia and had returned once more to Paris—­alone.  He was driving in a motor car and came upon her walking near the Arc de Triomphe.  He halted the car and asked her to let him drive her home.  At first she demurred, but in the end consented to let him drop her at her pension, provided he would promise to leave her immediately at her door.

“Assuredly,” agreed the man gravely.  “But in return, you will do me a favor also?  You will let me call for you tonight and will dine with me?”

For a moment Loraine hesitated, then she slowly nodded her head.

Carlos de Metuan arrived promptly that evening.

Loraine had made her fight and regarded herself as a defeated martyr.  The hour and a half before his coming she had not devoted to tears, but to beautifying herself.  She met him radiant, and from her eyes and lips all the disfigurement of distress was banished.  She laughed and chatted throughout dinner, and over the coffee, leaning forward a little, she asked, “Where do you mean to take me from here?”

“To a comedy perhaps, wherever you like.”

There was a brief pause, then she looked up and put a second question.  She put it with the best nonchalance that she could assume.  It did not sound like unconditional surrender.

“And after that?”

Carlos de Metuan lighted a cigarette.

“I have leased for you a very good apartment not far from the Champs Elysees.  I think you will find it comfortable.”

For an instant the woman’s eyes hardened.

“You appear to have taken matters rather much for granted, Carlos.”

He shook his head and smiled.

“I merely hoped,” he assured her.

CHAPTER XXIX

Possibly some day a historian versed in the intricacies of high—­and low—­finance will record in detail, comprehensible and convincing to those who thirst for statistical minutiae, the last chapters of Hamilton Burton’s history.  Here it will only be set baldly down that the weeks, for him, went galloping toward and over the brink of things—­until he found his affairs still reckoned in many millions, but all in the millions of liabilities.