sed, never
understood in Paris--staying at the hotel and sending notes to a young
English M'sieur in another. Yes, this was plainly an intrigue of the
genuine order, and the mari would doubtless arrive from England later.
All was plain, and he stood with a patronising smile by the table,
while I scribbled a note to Lucia.

"My Dearest Life,--I am rushing, flying to you now. I will be with you
as soon as fiacre can bring me." "VICTOR."

I closed it, and made him wait while I sealed it, lest he should
interfere with it. Then I handed it to him with a two-franc piece, and
with bon jours and remerciments and grins he withdrew.

I dressed hurriedly and yet carefully, and shaved with a dangerously
trembling hand. The first fiacre that was passing as I left the hotel I
took, and was driven, through the bright sunshine that filled the Paris
boulevards, to the Grand. I sat back in it, with my arms folded,
feeling my heart like a stone within me. Lucia's coming, that,
thirty-six hours back, would have infused the extreme of delight
through me, was now useless, worthless.

I could do nothing, say nothing. I was a prisoner again, fettered,
bound, as if I had an iron collar on my neck, and manacles on my
wrists. I looked through the shining, quivering sunlight that fell on
every side with blank, unseeing eyes, and the bitterest curses against
Howard rose to my lips, checked only by the knowledge that I had
forgiven him.

When I reached the hotel, and mentioned her name, I was shown up to a
private sitting-room on the first floor, facing the gay Paris
boulevard, and with the bright light streaming in through its
half-closed persiennes. A figure rose at the opening of the door, and
came towards me with outstretched hands.

"Lucia!"

My eyes fixed on her, and my glance rushed over her in a second, and
poured with feverish haste their report back into my brain. Within the
first moment of my entry of the room, I was conscious of, I recognised
that there was a great change, an almost indefinable, but nevertheless
distinctly perceptible, metamorphosis in this woman since I had seen
her last. Lucia was a somnambulist no longer. She had awakened. It was
a lovely, living woman who crossed the room to me now; a woman awake to
her own powers, conscious of the sceptre, and the gifts, and the
kingdom that Nature puts into the hands of a woman for a few years, I
felt all this as I looked at her, saw it in her advance towards me,
heard it