It has come to this, that I must lie down for some hours during the day lest I should fall to pieces.

“I suppose I’ll have to,” I laughed.  “What a thing it is to have the wits of a man and the strength of a baby.”

She pressed my arm and said in her low caressing voice which I had not heard for many weeks:  “I shouldn’t be so proud of those man’s wits, if I were you.”

I knew she said it playfully with reference to masculine non-perception of the feminine; but I chose to take it broadly.

“My dear Lola,” said I, “it has been borne in upon me that I am the most witless fool that the unwisdom of generations of English country squires has ever succeeded in producing.”

“Don’t talk rot,” she said, with foolishness in her eyes.

She accompanied me bareheaded in the sunshine to the gate of my hotel.

“Come and dine with me, if you’re well enough,” she said as we parted.

I assented, and when the evening came I went.  Did I not say that we were like two lost souls wandering alone in the mist?

It was only when I rose to bid her good-night that she referred to Dale.

“I wrote to him this afternoon,” she announced curtly.

“You said you would do so.”

“Would you like to know what I told him?”

She put her hands behind her back and stood facing me, somewhat defiantly, in all her magnificence.  I smiled.  Women, much as they scoff at the blindness of our sex, are often transparent.

“It’s your firm determination to tell me,” said I.  “Well?”

She advanced a step nearer to me, and looked me straight in the eyes defiantly.

“I told him that I loved you with all my heart and all my soul.  I told him that you didn’t know it; that you didn’t care a brass curse for me; that you had acted as you thought best for the happiness of himself and me.  I told him that while you lived I could not think of another man.  I told him that if you could face Death with a smile on your face, he might very well show the same courage and not chuck things right and left just because a common woman wouldn’t marry him or live with him and spoil his career.  There!  That’s what I told him.  What do you think?”

“Heaven knows what effect it will have,” said I, wearily, for I was very, very tired.  “But why, my poor Lola, have you wasted your love on a shadow like me?”

She answered after the foolish way of women.

I have not heard from either Dale or Lady Kynnersley.  A day or two ago, in reply to a telegram to Raggles, I learned that Dale had lost the election.

This, then, is the end of my apologia pro vita mea, which I began with so resonant a flourish of vainglory.  I have said all that there is to be said.  Nothing more has happened or is likely to happen until they put me under the earth.  Oh, yes, I was forgetting.  In spite of my Monte Cristo munificence, poor Latimer has been hammered on the Stock Exchange.  Poor Lucy and the kids!