“How do you know I didn’t like it?” I asked.

“I felt it.”

“You mustn’t feel things like that,” I remarked.  “It isn’t good for you.”

She insisted on my telling her.  I explained as well as I could.  She touched the sleeve of my coat with her gloved hand.

“I’m glad, because it shows you take an interest in me.  And I wanted to let you see that I could do something besides loll about in a drawing-room and smoke cigarettes.  It’s all I can do.  But it’s something.”  She said it with the humility of the Jongleur de Notre Dame in Anatole Frances’s story.

In Eaton Square, where I had a luncheon engagement, she dropped me, and drove off smiling, evidently well pleased with herself.  My hostess was standing by the window when I was shown into the drawing-room.  I noted the faintest possible little malicious twinkle in her eye.

During the afternoon I had a telephonic message from my doctor, who asked me why I had neglected him for a fortnight and urged me to go to Harley Street at once.  To humour him I went the next morning.  Hunnington is a bluff, hearty fellow who feeds himself into pink floridity so as to give confidence to his patients.  In answer to his renewed inquiry as to my neglect, I remarked that a man condemned to be hanged doesn’t seek interviews with the judge in order to learn how the rope is getting on.  I conveyed to him politely, although he is an old friend, that I desired to forget his well-fed existence.  In his chatty way he requested me not to be an ass, and proceeded to put to me the usual silly questions.

Remembering the result of my last visit, I made him happy by answering them gloomily; whereupon he seized his opportunity and ordered me out of England for the winter.  I must go to a warm climate—­Egypt, South Africa, Madeira—­I could take my choice.  I flatly refused to obey.  I had my duties in London.  He was so unsympathetic as to damn my duties.  My duty was to live as long as possible, and my wintering in London would probably curtail my short life by two months.  Then I turned on him and explained the charitable disingenuousness of my replies to his questions.  He refused to believe me, and we parted with mutual recriminations.  I sent him next day, however, a brace of pheasants, a present from Farfax Glenn.  After all, he is one of God’s creatures.

The next time I called on Lola Brandt I went with the fixed determination to make some progress in my mission.  I vowed that I would not be seduced by trumpery conversation about Yokohama or allow my mind to be distracted by absurd adventures among cats.  I would clothe myself in the armour of eumoiriety, and, with the sword of duty in my hand, would go forth to battle with the enchantress.  All said and done, what was she but a bold-faced, strapping woman without an idea in her head save the enslavement of an impressionable boy several years her junior?  It was preposterous that I, Simon de Gex, who had beguiled and fooled an