ld take some of the
pain----"

"There isn't any, dear, I'm wonderfully lucky."

Peters came in to take him to bed.

She kissed him again and left him.

"Looking done up to-night, sir," said Peters.

"I am," said Roddy.

CHAPTER IV

MARCH 13th: BRETON'S TIGER

"If I'd had the power not to be born, I would certainly not
have accepted existence upon conditions that are such a
mockery. But I still have the power to die, though the days I
give back are numbered. It's no great power, it's no great
mutiny."--DOSTOEVSKY.

I

Christopher's knowledge of Rachel, long and intimate though it had been,
had never made him sure of her. In his relations with his fellow-men he
proceeded on the broad lines that best suited, he felt, any
investigation of his own character. Broad lines, however, did not catch
that subtle spirit that was Rachel; he had been baffled again and again
by some fierceness or sudden wildness in her, and had often been held
from approaching her lest by something too impetuous or ill-considered
he should drive her from him altogether. He had been aware that, since
her marriage, she had been gradually slipping from him, and this had
made him, during the last year, the more careful how he approached her.
He loved her the more in that something that was part of her was strange
and mysterious to him; the idealist and the poet concealed in him behind
his frank worldliness cherished her aloofness. She was precious to him
because nothing else in this life had quite her unexpected beauty.

Since that afternoon when the Duchess had paid her visit to Roddy he
wished many times that he were a cleverer man. He felt that something
must instantly be done, but he felt, too, that one false step on his
part would plunge them all into the most tragical catastrophe.

He was baffled by his own ignorance as to the real truth; neither Breton
nor Rachel had taken him into their confidence. He could not say how any
of them could be expected to act, and yet he knew that something must
be done at once. He saw Rachel through it all, like a strange dark
flower, mysterious, shining, with her colour, beyond his grasp, but so
beautiful, so poignant! She had never appealed to him as now, in the
heart of some danger that he could not define she eluded him and yet
demanded his help.

After much puzzled thinking he decided that it must be Breton whom he
had best approach, and so he wrote and asked him