king about them and wondering. The
eyes haunted him. It will have been reasonably evident that Ste. Marie
was a fanciful and imaginative soul. He needed but a chance word, the
sight of a face in a crowd, the glance of an eye, to begin
story-building, and he would go on for hours about it and work himself
up to quite a passion with his imaginings. He should have been a writer
of fiction.

He began forthwith to construct romances about this lady of the
motor-car. He wondered why she should have been with the shady
Irishman--if Irishman he was--O'Hara, and with some anxiety he wondered
what the two were to each other. Captain Stewart's little cynical jest
came to his mind, and he was conscious of a sudden desire to kick Miss
Benham's middle-aged uncle.

The eyes haunted him. What was it they suffered? Out of what misery did
they call--and for what? He walked all the long way home to his little
flat overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens, haunted by those eyes. As he
climbed his stair it suddenly occurred to him that they had quite driven
out of his mind the image of his beautiful lady who sat among the stars,
and the realization came to him with a shock.

* * * * *

IV

OLD DAVID STEWART

It was Miss Benham's custom, upon returning home at night from
dinner-parties or other entertainments, to look in for a few minutes on
her grandfather before going to bed. The old gentleman, like most
elderly people, slept lightly, and often sat up in bed very late into
the night, reading or playing piquet with his valet. He suffered
hideously at times from the malady which was killing him by degrees, but
when he was free from pain the enormous recuperative power, which he had
preserved to his eighty-sixth year, left him almost as vigorous and
clear-minded as if he had never been ill at all. Hartley's description
of him had not been altogether a bad one: "a quaint old beggar... a
great quantity of white hair and an enormous square white beard and the
fiercest eyes I ever saw..." He was a rather "quaint old beggar,"
indeed! He had let his thick, white hair grow long, and it hung down
over his brows in unparted locks as the ancient Greeks wore their hair.
He had very shaggy eyebrows, and the deep-set eyes under them gleamed
from the shadow with a fierceness which was rather deceptive but none
the less intimidating. He had a great beak of a nose, but the mouth
below could not be seen. It was hidden