color, and echoed laughter. Nowhere, from the spot where the
guillotine had stood to the circle where Napoleon decreed his arch,
did there seem a niche for sorrow.

"Will you wait here to see to what he awakens?" questioned Steele.

Duska shook her head.

"I have no right to wait. And yet--yet, I can't go home!" She leaned
toward him, impulsively. "I couldn't bear going back to Kentucky now,"
she added, plaintively; "I couldn't bear it."

"You will go to Nice for a while," said Steele, firmly. He had fallen
into the position, of arranging their affairs. Mrs. Horton, distressed
in Duska's distress, found herself helpless to act except upon his
direction.

The girl nodded, apathetically.

"It doesn't matter," she said.

Then, she looked up again.

"But I want you to stay. I want you to do everything you can for both
of them." She paused, and her next words were spoken with an effort:
"And I don't want--I don't want you to speak of me. I don't want you
to try to remind him."

"He will question me," demurred Steele.

Duska's head was raised with a little gesture of pride.

"I am not afraid," she said, "that he will ask you anything he should
not--anything that he has not the right to ask."

CHAPTER XX

When he turned back, a day later, from the turmoil of the station,
from the strenuous labor of weighing trunks, locating the compartment
in the train, subsidizing the guards, and, hardest of all, saying
good-bye to Duska with a seeming or normal cheerfulness, Steele found
himself irritably out of measure with the quick-step of Paris. Mrs.
Horton and the girl were on their way to the Riviera. He was left
behind to watch results; almost, it seemed to him, to sit by and
observe the post-mortem on every hope in the lives of three people.
Nice should still be quiet. The tidal wave of "trippers" would not for
a little while sweep over its rose-covered slopes and white beaches
and dazzling esplanades, and the place would afford the girl at least
every soothing influence that nature could offer. That would not be
much, but it would be something.

As for himself, he felt the isolation of Paris. On a desert, a man
may become lonely; in deep forests and on high mountains, he may come
to know and hate his own soul in solitude, but the last note of
aloofness, of utter exile, is that which comes to him who looks vainly
for one face in a sea of other faces, whose small cosmos lies in
unwept and unnoticed ruin in t