and holy beacons of God. Marriage,
between a prince of the blood and the child of a shoemaker!"

Bentham gave vent to a low laugh, which was quite devoid of merriment.
It is the trick of those who spend their lives in plumbing the
unfathomable; it translates the meagreness and vacuity of their lore.

"Of course the family was outraged," he went on; "his mother appealed,
grovelled on her knees, so it is said, and in the end he gave way. He
agreed to part from his beloved. But he asked that she might sit for me,
and would sometimes muse for hours over the latest travail of my brush.
Then he became engaged to the Countess Dahlic--there is no accounting
for the moral weakness of men under family pressure--and the wedding day
was fixed. All this time he had kept his word. He had never spoken to or
seen Gretchen, and she, poor child, was dying--yes, dying slowly--not as
we die, but fading like twilight, imperceptibly, fainting like high
purpose, blighted by the coarse breath of the million."

He knocked the end off his cigarette and stared for a while at the
gas-smoked ceiling.

"Then--one day when the marriage was close at hand, when flags hung from
the housetops and garlands across the streets, there was a stir in the
house of the cobbler. Gretchen had been sitting to me as a Spanish maid
in a mantilla, with a camellia in her hair and on her chest. Dressed so,
she was found locked in the arms of the Prince. Both were dead--and the
camellia was crushed to brown as you see. It came into my possession
with the lace which belonged to me--an art property that is now too
entangled with the human and with the divine ever to be used lightly
again."

"A sad story," I sighed, turning the leaf. "Poor child, so young and
pretty and----"

"Good," he added. "It is astonishing to calculate the amount of virtue
which lurks about unlabelled by the wedding ring."

* * * * *

"That," he said, turning over a fresh page, "was once a bunch of
violets; it should have belonged to Jacquaine."

"Who was Jacquaine?"

"She was a romantic creature, full of music and passionate inspiration;
but she had one fault, that of inventing ideals. Don't you find that
most women come to grief over this pastime?"

He scarcely demanded a reply, but went on as though thinking aloud.

"She made a deity of her husband, who was a clever 'cellist, but merely
a man. When he became dazzled with a vulgar, opulent, overblown per