d Gessner had told him when they
discussed the affair, and he remembered it to his great satisfaction.
For if Alban were Lois Boriskoff's lover, then might he venture even
where the police were afraid to go.

"I will talk it all over with the Chief," the Count exclaimed abruptly;
"you have had a long day and are better in bed. Don't stand on any
ceremony, but please go directly you feel inclined."

Alban did not demur for he was tired out and that was the truth of it.
In his own room he recalled the question the Count had put to him and
wondered that it had so distressed him. Why had his cheeks tingled and
the words stumbled upon his lips because he had been called Lois
Boriskoff's lover? It used not to be so when they walked Union Street
together and all the neighbors regarded the engagement as an
accomplished fact. He had never resented such a charge then--what had
happened that he should resent it now? Was it the long weeks of
temptation he had suffered in Anna Gessner's presence? Had the world of
riches so changed him that any mention of the old time could make him
ashamed? He knew not what to think--the blood rushed to his cheeks again
and his heart beat quickly when he remembered that but for Count
Sergius's visit to Hampstead, he might have been Anna's betrothed
to-day.

In this he was, as ever, entirely candid with himself, neither condoning
his faults nor accusing himself blindly. There had been nothing of the
humbler realities of love in his relations with Richard Gessner's
daughter; none of the superb spirit of self-sacrifice; none of those
fine ideals which his boyhood had desired to set up. He had worshipped
her beauty--so much he readily admitted; her presence had ever been
potent to quicken his blood and claim the homage of his senses; but of
that deeper understanding and mutual sympathy by which love is born she
had taught him nothing. Why this should have been so, he could not
pretend to say. Her father's riches and the glamour of the great house
may have had not a little to do with it. Alban had always seemed to
stand apart from all which the new world showed to him. He felt that he
had no title to a place there, no just claim at all to those very favors
his patron thrust upon him so lavishly.

He was as a man escaped from a prison whose bars were of gold--a prison
whereof the jailer had been a beautiful and capricious woman. Here in
Warsaw he discovered a new world; but one that seemed altogether