In such a night
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
Upon the wild sea-banks, and waft her love
To come again to Carthage.

Marigny had indeed arranged a situation worthy of his nurturing among
the decadents of Paris. He believed that in these surroundings an
impressionable girl would admit him to a degree of intimacy not to be
attained by many days of prosaic meetings. At the right moment, when
his well-bribed servant was gone to Langford, he would remember a
bottle of wine and some sandwiches stored in the car that morning to
provide the luncheon that he might not obtain at a wayside inn.
Cynthia and he would make merry over the feast. The magnetism that had
never yet failed him in affairs of the heart would surely prove
potent now at this real crisis in his life. Marriage to a rich woman
could alone snatch him from the social abyss, and the prospect became
doubly alluring when it took the guise of Cynthia. He would restore
her to a disconsolate chaperon some time before midnight, and he was
cynic enough to admit that if he had not then succeeded in winning her
esteem by his chivalry, his unobtrusive tenderness, his devoted
attentions--above all, by his flow of interesting talk and well-turned
epigram--the fault would be his own, and not attributable to adverse
conditions.

It was not surprising, therefore, that he failed to choke back the
curse quick risen to his lips when the throb of the Mercury's engine
came over the crest of the hill. Never was mailed dragon more terrible
to the beholder, even in the days of knight-errantry. In an instant
his well-conceived project had gone by the board. He saw himself
discredited, suspected, a skulking plotter driven into the open, a
self-confessed trickster utterly at the mercy of some haphazard
question that would lay bare his pretenses and cover his counterfeit
rhapsody with ridicule.

If Cynthia had heard, and hearing understood, it is possible that a
great many remarkable incidents then in embryo would have passed into
the mists of what might have been. For instance, she would not have
deigned to notice Count Edouard Marigny's further existence. The next
time she met him he would fill a place in the landscape comparable to
that occupied by a migratory beetle. But her heart was leaping for
joy, and her cry of thankfulness quite drowned in her ears the
Frenchman's furious oath.

Mrs. Devar, having had time to gather her wits,