Isham Frederic Stewart
The Strollers

CHAPTER VII
A MEETING ON THE MOUNT

Clothed at its base in a misty raiment of purple, the royal hill lifted above the valley an Olympian crest of porphyritic rock into the fathomless blue. Here not Jupiter and his court looked serenely down upon the struggling race, “indifferent from their awful height,” but a dark-hued god, in Aztec vestments, gazed beyond the meadows to the floating flower beds, the gardens with their baths, and the sensuous dancing girls. All this, but a panorama between naps, soon faded away; the god yawned, drew his cloak of humming bird feathers more closely about him and sank back to rest. An uproar then disturbed his paleozoic dreams; like fluttering spirits of the garish past, the butterflies arose in the forest glades; and the voices of old seemed to chant the Aztec psalm: “The horrors of the tomb are but the cradle of the sun, and the dark shadows of death the brilliant lights for the stars.” Even so they had chanted when the early free-booters burst upon the scene and beheld the valley with its frame-work of mountains and two guardian volcanoes, the Gog and Magog of the table-land.

Now again, from the towering column of Montezuma’s cypress, to the city marked by spires, the thunder rolled and echoed onward even to the pine-clad cliffs and snow-crowned summits of the rocky giants. Puffs of smoke dotted the valley beneath the mount, and, as the answering reports reverberated across space, nature’s mortars in the inclosure of mountains sent forth threatening wreaths of white in sympathy with the eight-inch howitzers and sixteen-pounders turned upon the crest of the royal hill.

When the trees were yet wet with their bath of dew the booming of artillery and the clattering of small arms dispelled that peace which partook of no harsher discord than the purling of streams and the still, small voices of the forest. Through the groves where the spirit of Donna Marina–the lost love of the marauder–was said to wander, shrieked the round shot, shells and grape. Through tangled shrubberies, bright with flowers and colored berries, pierced the discharge of canister; the air, fragrant at the dawn with orange blossom and starry jessamine, was noisome with suffocating, sulphurous fumes, and, beneath the fetid shroud, figures in a fog heedlessly trampled the lilies, the red roses and “flowers of the heart.”

From the castle on the summit–mortal trespass upon the immortal pale of the gods!–the upward shower was answered by an iron downpour, and two storming parties, with ladders, pick-axes and crows, advanced, one on each side of the hill, to the attack. Boom! boom! before one of the parties, climbing and scrambling to the peak, belched the iron missives of destruction from the concealed mouths of heavy guns, followed by the rattling shower from small arms.

Surprised, they paused, panting from the swift ascent, some throwing themselves prone upon the earth, while the grape and canister passed harmlessly over them, others seeking such shelter as rocks, trees and shrubs afforded. Here and there a man fell, but was not suffered to lie long exposed to the fire of the redoubt which, strongly manned, held them in check midway to the summit. Doggedly their comrades rescued the wounded and quickly conveyed them to the rear.

“They’ve set out their watch-dogs,” remarked the general commanding the assault on that side of the hill, to one of his officers, as he critically surveyed the formidable defense through the tangled shrubbery. “Here is a battery we hadn’t reckoned on.”

“It was to be expected, sir,” responded the officer. “They were sure to have some strong point we couldn’t locate.”

“Yes,” grumbled the general; “in such a jumble of foliage and rocks it would take an eagle’s eye to pick out all their miserable ambuscades.”

“I have no doubt, sir, the men are rested now,” ventured the other.

“No doubt they are,” chuckled the general, still studying the situation, glancing to the right and the left of the redoubt. “The more fighting they get the more they want. They are not so band-boxy as they were, but remind me of an old, mongrel dog I once owned. He wasn’t much to look at–but I’ll tell you the story later.” A sudden quick decision appearing on his face. Evidently the working of his mind had been foreign to his words.

“Saint-Prosper,” he said, “I suppose the boys on the other side are going up all the time? I promised our troops the honor of pulling down that flag. I’m a man of my word; go ahead and take the batteries and”–stroking his long gray goatee–“beat Pillow to the top.”

A word; a command; they rushed forward; not a laggard in the ranks; not a man who shirked the leaden shower; not one who failed to offer his breast openly and fearlessly to the red death which to them might come when it would. Unwaveringly over rocks, chasms and mines, they followed the tall figure of their leader; death underfoot, death overhead! What would courage avail against concealed mines? Yet like a pack of hounds that reck naught while the scent is warm, they pressed forward, ever forward; across the level opening, where some dropped out of the race, and over the ramparts! A brief struggle; confusion, turmoil; something fearful occurring that no eye could see in its entirety through the smoke; afterwards, a great shout that announced to the palace on the mount the fate of the intermediary batteries!

But there was sharper and more arduous work to come; this, merely a foretaste of the last, fierce stand of the besieged; a stand in which they knew they were fighting for everything, where defeat meant the second conquest of Mexico! From the batteries the assailants had captured to the foot of the castle seemed but a little way to them in their zeal; no one thought of weariness, or the toil of the ascent. But one determination possessed them–to end it all quickly; to carry everything before them! Their victory at the redoubt gave them such sudden, wild confidence that castles seemed no more than ant-hills–to be trampled on! Instinctively every man felt sure of the day and already experienced the glory of conquering that historic hill; that invincible fortress! Over the great valley, so beautiful in its physical features, so inspiring in its associations, should hang the stars of the North, with the stars of heaven!

The scaling ladders were brought up and planted by the storming party; the first to mount were hurled back, killed or wounded, to the rocks below, but others took their places; a lodgment was effected, and, like the water bursting over a dike, a tide of besiegers found ingress.

Under a galling fire, with shouts that rang above the noise of rifles, they drove the masses of the enemy from their guns; all save one, not a Mexican from his fair skin, who stood confidently beside his piece, an ancient machine, made of copper and strengthened by bands of iron. A handsome face; dead to morality, alive to pleasure; the face of a man past thirty, the expression of immortal one-and-twenty! A figure from the pages of Ovid, metamorphosed to a gunner of Santa Anna! The bright radiance from a cloudless sky, the smoke having drifted westward from the summit, fell upon him and his gun.

With inscrutable calmness, one hand fondling the breech, he regarded the fleeting figures and the hoarse-throated pursuers; then, as if to time the opportunity to the moment, he bent over the gun.

“I wonder if this first-born can still bark!” he muttered.

But an instant’s hesitation, friend and foe being fairly intermingled, was fatal to his purpose; the venerable culverin remained silent, and the gunner met hand-to-hand a figure that sprang from the incoming host. Simultaneously the rapid firing of a new wave of besiegers from the other side of the castle threw once more a pall of smoke over the scene, and, beneath its mantle, the two men were like figures struggling in a fog, feeling rather than seeing each other’s blade, divining by touch the cut, pass or aggressive thrust.

“Faugh!” laughed the gunner. “They’ll kill us with smoke.”

The discharge of small arms gradually ceased; the fresh breeze again cleared the crest of the mount, showing the white walls of the structure which had been so obstinately defended; the valley, where the batteries now lay silent, having spoken their thundering prologue, and the alien flag, the regimental colors of the invaders, floating from the upper walls. Below on the road toward the city, a band of white across the table land, successive spots of smoke momentarily appeared and were succeeded, after a considerable interval, by the rub-a-dub of rifles. From the disenchanting distance the charge of a body of men, in the attempt to dislodge a party entrenched in a ditch, lost the tragic aspect of warfare, and the soldiers who fell seemed no larger than the toy figures of a nursery game.

With the brightening of the summit to the light of day, eagerly the two combatants near the copper gun gazed for the first time into each other’s eyes, and, at that trenchant glance, a tremor crossed the features of the gunner, and his arm, with its muscles of steel, suddenly became inert, powerless.

“Mon Dieu!–’Tis Ernest–little Ernest!” he exclaimed, wonderingly.

For all that his opponent’s sword, ominously red from the fierce first assault at the wall, was at his breast, he made no effort to oppose its threatening point, when a grape-shot, swifter than the blade, fairly struck the gunner. With blood streaming from his shoulder, he swayed from side to side, passing his hand before his eyes as one who questions oracular evidence, and then sank to the earth with an arm thrown over the tube of copper. Above his bronzed face the light curls waved like those of a Viking; though his clothes were dyed with the sanguinary hue and his chest rose and fell with labored breathing, it was with an almost quizzical glance he regarded the other who stood as if turned to stone.

“That was not so easily done, Ernest,” he said, not unkindly, “but surprise broke down my guard.”

“Before God, it was not I!” cried the soldier, starting from a trance.

“And if it were!” With his free arm he felt his shoulder. “I believe you are right,” he observed, coolly. “Swords break no bones.”

“I will get a surgeon,” said the other, as he turned.

“What for? To shake his head? Get no one, or if–for boyish days!–you want to serve me, lend me your canteen.”

Saint-Prosper held it to his lips, and he drank thirstily.

“That was a draught in an oasis. I had the desert in my throat–the desert, the wild desert! What a place to meet! But they caught Abd-el-Kader, and there was nothing for it but to flee! Besides, I am a rolling stone.”

To hear him who had betrayed his country and shed the blood of his comrades, characterize himself by no harsher term was an amazing revelation of the man’s character.

The space around them had become almost deserted; here and there lay figures on the ground among which might be distinguished a sub-lieutenant and other students of the military college, the castle having been both academy and garrison. Their tuition barely over, so early had they given up their lives beneath the classic walls of their alma mater! The exhilarating cheering and shouting had subsided; the sad after-flavor succeeded the lust of conquest.

“Yes,” continued the gunner, though the words came with an effort. “First, it was the desert. What a place to roll and rove! I couldn’t help it for the life of me! When I was a boy I ran away from school; a lad, I ran away from college! If I had been a sailor I would have deserted the ship. After they captured the prophet, I deserted the desert. So, hey for Mexico, a hilly place for a rolling stone!”

He gasped, held his hand to his shoulder and brought it away covered with red. But that Saint-Prosper knelt swiftly, sustaining and supporting him, he would have slid to the ground. He smiled–sweetly enough–on the stern soldier and placed his moist and stained hand caressingly on that of his companion. Seeing them thus, it was not difficult to trace a family likeness–a similarity in their very dissimilarity. The older was younger; the younger, older. The gunner’s hair was light, his face wild as a gerfalcon beneath; the other’s dark, with a countenance, habitually repressed, but now, at the touch of that dishonored hand, grown cold and harsh; yet despite the total difference of expression, the hereditary resemblance could not be stamped out. Even the smile of the wounded man was singularly like that of his brother–a rare transformation that seldom failed to charm.

“That’s my story,” he said, smiling now, as though all the problems of life and death could be thus dismissed. “As the prophet said: ‘I have urged my camel through every desert!’ You see I know my Koran well. But how came you here, Ernest? I thought you were in Africa, colonizing–us!”

“It was impossible to stay there long,” replied Saint-Prosper, slowly.

“There’s that cloud of smoke again,” muttered the wounded man, apparently oblivious to the other’s response. As he spoke he withdrew his hand from that of his brother. At that moment the tropic sun was bathing him in its light and the white walls shone with luster. “No; it’s like the desert; the dark hour before the sand-storm.” Upon his brow the perspiration gathered, but his lip curled half-scornfully, half-defiantly. “Turn me toward the valley, Ernest. There’s more space; more light!”

The soldier, an automaton in passive compliance, placed him where he commanded the outlook cityward; the open plain, protected by the breast-works of mountains; the distant spires trembling on the horizon; the lakes which once marked the Western Venice, a city of perfume and song. Striking a body of water, the sun converted it into a glowing shield, a silver escutcheon of the land of silver, and, in contrast with this polished splendor, the shadows, trailing on the far-away mountains, were soft, deep and velvety. But the freedom of the outlook afforded the wounded man little comfort.

“The storm!” he said.

A change passed over his face, as of a shadow drawn before it. He groped helplessly with his hand.

“Feel in my burnoose, Ernest. A bag–around my neck–open it!”

Saint-Prosper thrust his hand within the coat, shuddering at the contact with the ebbing life’s blood, and drew forth a leather bag which he placed in the other’s trembling fingers. With an effort, breathing laboriously, and staring hard, as though striving to penetrate a gathering film, the wounded man finally managed to display the contents of the bag, emptying them in his palm, where they glinted and gleamed in the sun’s rays. Sapphires, of delicate blue; emeralds with vitreous luster; opals of brilliant iridescence–but, above all, a ruby of perfect color and extraordinary size, cut en cabachon, and exhibiting a marvelous star of many rays; the ruby of Abd-el-Kader!

With a venal expression of delight, the gunner regarded the contents of the bag, feeling the gems one by one. “The rarest stone–from the Sagyin hills, Ernest!” he whispered, as his trembling fingers played with the ruby.

But even as he fondled it, a great pain crossed his breast; he gripped his shoulder tight with his free hand, clutching the precious stones hard in his clenched fist. Thus he remained, how long the other never knew, panting, growing paler, as the veins that carried life to his heart were being slowly emptied.

His head dropped. “How dark!” he murmured. “Like a m’chacha where the hashish-smokers dream!”

The younger brother thought his energy was spent when he looked up sharply.

“The lamp’s out, you Devil Jew!” he cried. “The pipe, too–spawn of hell!”

And he dropped back like stone, the gems falling from his hand, which twitched spasmodically on the ground and then was still. Saint-Prosper bent over him, but the heart, famished for nourishment, had ceased to beat; the restless, wayward soul had fled from its tabernacle of dust. Save for the stain on his breast and the fixedness of his eyes, he might have been sleeping.

Mechanically the soldier gathered the sapphires, emeralds and other gems–flashing testimony of that thankless past–and, leaning against the wall, gazed afar to the snow-capped volcanoes. Even as he looked, the vapors arose from the solfataras of the “smoking mountain” and a vast shower of cinders and stones was thrown into the air. Unnoticed passed the eruption before the gaze of Saint-Prosper, whose mind in a torpor swept dully back to youth’s roseate season, recalling the homage of the younger for the elder brother, a worship as natural as pagan adoration of the sun. From the sanguine fore-time to the dead present lay a bridge of darkness. With honor within grasp, deliberately he had sought dishonor, little recking of shame and murder, and childishly husbanding green, red and blue pebbles!

Weighing the stones in his hand now, Ernest Saint-Prosper looked at them long and bitterly. For these the honor and pride of an old family had been sold. For these he himself had endured the reflected disgrace; isolation from comradeship; distrust which had blighted his military career at the outset. How different had been the reality from his expectations; the buoyant hopes of youth; the fond anticipation of glory, succeeded by stigma and stain! And, as the miserable, perplexing panorama of these later years pictured itself in his brain he threw, with a sudden gesture, the gems far from him, over the wall, out toward the valley!

Like dancing beams of color, they flashed a moment in mid air; then mingled their hues with the rainbow tints of a falling stream. Lost to sight, they sank in the crystal waters which leaped with a caressing murmur toward the table-land; only the tiny spectrum, vivid reminder of their color, still waved and wavered from rock to rock above a pellucid pool.

“I beg your pardon, Colonel,” said a voice at his elbow, breaking in upon his reflections; “are you wounded?”

With drawn features, the officer turned.

“No; I am not wounded.”

“The general directs you to take this message to the commanding general,” continued the little aide. “I believe I may congratulate you, sir, for you will have the honor of bearing the news of the victory.” He handed Saint-Prosper a sealed message. “It’s been a glorious day, sir, but”–gazing carelessly around him–“has cost many a brave life!”

“Yes, many a life!” answered the other, placing the message in his breast and steadfastly regarding for the last time the figure beneath the gun.

“We ought to be in the City of Mexico in a day or two, sir,” resumed the aide. “Won’t it be jolly though, after forced marches and all that sort of thing! Fandangos; tambourines; cymbals! And the pulque! What creatures of the moment we are, sir!” he added, with sudden thoughtfulness. “’Twill be, after all, like dancing over the graves of our dear comrades!”

CHAPTER VIII
A FAIR PENITENT

The reception to General Zachary Taylor, on his return from Mexico, and the inauguration of the carnival combined to the observance of a dual festival day in the Crescent City. Up the river, past the rice fields, disturbing the ducks and pelicans, ploughed the noisy craft bearing “Old Rough and Ready” to the open port of the merry-making town. When near the barracks, the welcoming cannon boomed, and the affrighted darkies on the remote plantations shook with dire forebodings of a Mexican invasion.

The boat rounded at the Place d’Armes, where, beneath a triumphal arch, General Taylor received the crown and chaplet of the people–popular applause–and a salvo of eloquence from the mayor. With flying colors and nourish of trumpets, a procession of civic and military bodies was then formed, the parade finally halting at the St. Charles, where the fatted calf had been killed and the succulent ox roasted. Sounding a retreat, the veteran commander fell back upon a private parlor to recuperate his forces in anticipation of the forthcoming banquet.

From this stronghold, where, however, not all of the enemy–his friends–could be excluded, there escaped an officer, with: “I’ll look around town a little, General.”

“Look around!” said the commander at the door. “I should think we had looked around! Well, don’t fall foul of too many juleps.”

With a laughing response, the young man pushed his way through the jostling crowd near the door, traversed the animated corridor, and soon found himself out on the busy street. Amid the variegated colors and motley throng, he walked, not, however, in King Carnival’s gay domains, but in a city of recollections. The tavern he had just left was associated with an unforgotten presence; the stores, the windows, the thoroughfares themselves were fraught with retrospective suggestion of the strollers.

Even now–and he came to an abrupt standstill–he was staring at the bill-board of the theater where she had played, the familiar entrance bedecked with bunting and festival inscriptions. Before its classic portals appeared the black-letter announcement of an act by “Impecunious Jordan, Ethiopian artist, followed by a Tableau of General Scott’s Capture of the City of Mexico.” Mechanically he stepped within and approached the box office. From the little cupboard, a strange face looked forth; even the ticket vender of old had been swallowed up by the irony of fate, and, instead of the well-remembered blond mustache of the erstwhile seller of seats, a dark-bearded man, with sallow complexion, inquired:

“How many?”

“One,” said Saint-Prosper, depositing a Mexican piece on the counter before the cubby-hole.

“We’ve taken in plenty of this kind of money to-day,” remarked the man, holding up the coin. “I reckon you come to town with old Zach?”

“Yes.” The soldier was about to turn away, when he changed his mind and observed: “You used to give legitimate drama here.”

“That was some time ago,” said the man in the box, reflectively. “The soldiers like vaudeville. Ever hear Impecunious Jordan?”

“I never did.”

“Then you’ve got a treat,” continued the vender. “He’s the best in his line. Hope you’ll enjoy it, sir,” he concluded, with the courtesy displayed toward one and all of “Old Rough and Ready’s” men that day. “It’s the best seat left in the house. You come a little late, you know.” And as the other moved away:

“How different they look before and after! They went to Mexico fresh as daisies, and come back–those that do–dead beat, done up!”

Passing through the door, Saint-Prosper was ushered to his seat in a renovated auditorium; new curtain, re-decorated stalls, mirrors and gilt in profusion; the old restfulness gone, replaced by glitter and show. Amid changed conditions, the derangement of fixed external form and outline, the sight of a broad face in the orchestra and the aspect of a colossal form riveted his attention. This person was neither stouter nor thinner than before; he perspired neither more nor less; he was neither older nor younger–seemingly; he played on his instrument neither better nor worse. Youth might fade, honors take wing, the face of nature change, but Hans, Gargantuan Hans, appeared but a figure in an eternal present! Gazing at that substantial landmark, the soldier was carried back in thought over the long period of separation to a forest idyl; a face in the firelight; the song of the katydid; the drumming of the woodpecker. Dreams; vain dreams! They had assailed him before, but seldom so sharply as now in a place consecrated to the past.

 
“Look out for the dandies,
 
 
 Girls, beware;
Look out for their blandishments,
 
 
 Dears, take care!
For they’re always ready–remember this!–
To pilfer from maids an unwilling kiss.
 
 
 Oh, me! Oh, my! There! There!” (Imaginary slaps.)
 

sang and gesticulated a lady in abbreviated skirts and low-cut dress, winking and blinking in ironical shyness, and concluding with a flaunting of her gown, a toe pointed ceilingward, and a lively “breakdown.” Then she vanished with a hop, skip and a bow, reappeared with a ravishing smile and threw a generous assortment of kisses among the audience, and disappeared with another hop, skip and a bow, as Impecunious Jordan burst upon the spectators from the opposite side of the stage.

Even the sight of Hans, a finger-post pointing to ways long since traversed, could not reconcile the soldier to his surroundings; the humor of the burnt-cork artist seemed inappropriate to the place; his grotesque dancing inadmissible in that atmosphere once consecrated to the comedy of manners and the stately march of the classic drama. Where Hamlet had moralized, a loutish clown now beguiled the time with some tom-foolery, his wit so broad, his quips were cannon-balls, and his audience, for the most part soldiers from Mexico, open-mouthed swallowed the entire bombardment. But Saint-Prosper, finding the performance dull, finally rose and went out, not waiting for the thrilling Tableaux of the Entrance into the City of Mexico of a hundred American troops (impersonated by young ladies in tropical attire) and the submission of Santa Anna’s forces (more young ladies) by sinking gracefully to their bended knees.

Fun and frolic were now in full swing on the thoroughfares; Democritus, the rollicker, had commanded his subjects to drive dull care away and they obeyed the jovial lord of laughter. Animal spirits ran high; mischief beguiled the time; mummery romped and rioted. Marshaled by disorder, armed with drollery and divers-hued banners, they marched to the Castle of Chaos, where the wise are fools, the old are young and topsy-turvy is the order of the day.

As Saint-Prosper stood watching the versicolored concourse swarm by, a sudden rush of bystanders to view Faith on a golden pedestal, looking more like Coquetry, propelled a dainty figure against the soldier. Involuntarily he put out his arm which girded a slender waist; Faith drove simpering by; the crowd melted like a receding wave, and the lady extricated herself, breathless as one of the maids in Lorenzo de Medici’s Songs of the Carnival.

“How awkward!” she murmured. “How–”

The sentence remained unfinished and an exclamation, “Mr. Saint-Prosper!” punctuated a gleam of recognition.

“Miss Duran!” he exclaimed, equally surprised, for he had thought the strollers scattered to the four winds.

“Mrs. Service, if you please!” Demurely; at the same time extending her hand with a faint flush. “Yes; I am really and truly married! But it is so long since we met, I believe I–literally flew to your arms!”

“That was before you recognized me,” he returned, in the same tone.

Susan laughed. “But how do you happen to be here? I thought you were dead. No; only wounded? How fortunate! Of course you came with the others. I should hardly know you. I declare you’re as thin as a lath and gaunt as a ghost. You look older, too. Remorse, I suppose, for killing so many poor Mexicans!”

“And you”–surveying her face, which had the freshness of morn–“look younger!”

“Of course!” Adjusting some fancied disorder of hair or bonnet. “Marriage is a fountain of youth for”–with a sigh–“old maids. Susan Duran, spinster! Horrible! Do you blame me?”

“For getting married? Not at all. Who is the fortunate man?” asked Saint-Prosper.

“A minister; an orthodox minister; a most orthodox minister!”

“No?” His countenance expressed his sense of the incongruity of the union. Susan one of the elect; the meek and lowly yokemate of–“How did it happen?” he said.

“In a perverse moment, I–went to church,” answered Susan. “There, I met him–I mean, I saw him–no, I mean, I heard him! It was enough. All the women were in love with him. How could I help it?”

“He must have been very persuasive.”

“Persuasive! He scolded us every minute. Dress and the devil! I”–casting down her eyes–“interested him from the first. He–he married me to reform me.”

“Ah,” commented the soldier, gazing doubtfully upon Susan’s smart gown, which, with elaborate art, followed the contours of her figure.

“But, of course, one must keep up appearances, you know,” she continued. “What’s the use of being a minister’s wife if you aren’t popular with the congregation? At least,” she added, “with part of them!” And Susan tapped the pavement with a well-shod boot and showed her white teeth. “If you weren’t popular, you couldn’t fill the seats–I mean pews,” she added, evasively. “But you must come and see me–us, I should say.”

“Unfortunately, I am leaving to-morrow.”

“To-morrow!” repeated Susan, reflectively. The pupils of her eyes contracted, something they did whenever she was thinking deeply, and her gaze passed quickly over his face, striving to read his impassive features. “So soon? When the carnival is on! That is too bad, to stay only one day, and not call on any of your old friends! Constance, I am sure, would be delighted to see you.”

Many women would have looked away under the circumstances, but Susan’s eyes were innocently fixed upon his. Half the pleasure of the assurance was in the accompanying glance and the friendly smile that went with it.

But a quiet question, “Miss Carew is living here?” was all the satisfaction she received.

“Yes. Have you not heard? She has a lovely home and an embarrassment of riches. Sweet embarrassment! Health and wealth! What more could one ask? Although I forgot, she was taken ill shortly after you left.”

“Ill,” he said, starting.

“Quite! But soon recovered!” And Susan launched into a narration of the events that had taken place while he was in Mexico, to which he listened with the composure of a man who, having had his share of the vagaries of fate, is not to be taken aback by new surprises, however singular or tragic. Susan expected an expression of regret–by look or word–over the loss of the marquis’ fortune, but either he simulated indifference or passed the matter by with philosophical fortitude.

“Poor Barnes!” was his sole comment.

“Yes; it was very lonely for Constance at first,” rattled on Susan. “But I fancy she will find a woman’s solace for that ailment,” she added meaningly.

“Marriage?” he asked soberly.

“Well, the engagement is not yet announced,” said Susan, hesitatingly. “But you know how things get around? And the count has been so attentive! You remember him surely–the Count de Propriac? But I must be off. I have an appointment with my husband and am already half an hour late.”