isplayed an idiotic
solemnity by dragging down the corners of the mouth. She turned away in
loathing.

Her mind fled to a scene far away in the land of the Volga when she was
a child, where she had seen buried two men, who had fought for their
insulted honour till both had died of their wounds. She remembered the
white and red sashes and the gay scarfs worn by the women at the
burial, the jackets with great silver buttons worn by the men, and the
silver-mounted pistols and bright steel knives in the garish belts. She
saw again the bodies of the two gladiators, covered with crimson robes,
carried shoulder-high on a soft bed of interlaced branches to the
graves beneath the trees. There, covered with flowers and sprigs and
evergreens, ribbons and favours, the kindly earth hid them, cloaked for
their long sleep, while women wept, and men praised the dead, and went
back to the open road again cheerily, as the dead would have them do.

If he had died--the man she had just left behind in that torpid sleep
which opiates bring--his body would have been carried to his last home
in just such a hideous equipage as this hearse. A shiver of revolt went
through her frame, and her mind went to him as she had seen him lying
between the white sheets of his bed, his hands, as they had lain
upon the coverlet, compact of power and grace, knit and muscular and
vital--not the hand for a violin but the hand for a sword.

As she had laid her hand upon his hot forehead and over his eyes, he had
unconsciously spoken her name. That had told her more of what really was
between them than she had ever known. In the presence of the catastrophe
that must endanger, if not destroy the work he had done, the career he
had made, he thought of her, spoke her name.

What could she do to prevent his ruin? She must do something, else she
had no right to think of him. As though her thoughts had summoned him,
she came suddenly upon Felix Marchand at a point where her path resolved
itself into two, one leading to Manitou, the other to her own home.

There was a malicious glint in the greenish eyes of the dissolute
demagogue as he saw her. His hat made a half-circle before it found his
head again.

"You pay early visits, mademoiselle," he said, his teeth showing
rat-like.

"And you late ones?" she asked meaningly.

"Not so late that I can't get up early to see what's going on," he
rejoined in a sour voice.

"Is it that those who beat you have to get up e