end up old Michel to valet you. He's the gardener who shot
you yesterday, and he may take it into his head to finish the job this
morning. If he does I sha'n't try to stop him."

"Nor I," said Ste. Marie. "Thanks very much for your trouble. An
excellent surgeon was lost in you."

O'Hara left the room, and presently the old caretaker, one-eyed,
gnomelike, shambling like a bear, sidled in and proceeded to set things
to rights. He looked, Ste. Marie said to himself, like something in an
old German drawing, or in those imitations of old drawings that one
sometimes sees nowadays in _Fliegende Blaetter_. He tried to make the
strange creature talk, but Michel went about his task with an air
half-frightened, half-stolid, and refused to speak more than an
occasional "oui" or a "bien, Monsieur," in answer to orders. Ste. Marie
asked if he might have some coffee and bread, and the old Michel nodded
and slipped from the room as silently as he had entered it.

Thereafter Ste. Marie trifled with the cat and got one hand well
scratched for his trouble, but in five minutes there came a knocking at
the door. He laughed a little. "Michel grows ceremonious when it's a
question of food," he said. "Entrez, mon vieux!"

The door opened, and Ste. Marie caught his breath.

"Michel is busy," said Coira O'Hara, "so I have brought your coffee."

She came into the sunlit room holding the steaming bowl of cafe au lait
before her in her two hands. Over it her eyes went out to the man who
lay in his bed, a long and steady and very grave look. "A goddess that
lady, a queen among goddesses--" Thus the little Jew of the Boulevard de
la Madeleine. Ste. Marie gazed back at her, and his heart was sick
within him to think of the contemptible role Fate had laid upon this
girl to play: the candle to the moth, the bait to the eager, unskilled
fish, the lure to charm a foolish boy.

The girl's splendid beauty seemed to fill all that bright room with, as
it were, a richer, subtler light. There could be no doubt of her
potency. Older and wiser heads than young Arthur Benham's might well
forget the world for her. Ste. Marie watched, and the heartsickness
within him was like a physical pain, keen and bitter. He thought of that
first and only previous meeting--the single minute in the
Champs-Elysees, when her eyes had held him, had seemed to beseech him
out of some deep agony. He thought of how they had haunted him afterward
both by day and by night--calling