s true. Koukou swept in three-quarters of the chips, rose with
dignity, and bowed to the company.

"Till to-morrow, gentlemen."

"Get along, the whole pack of you," howled the Hetman of Jitomir.
"Stay with me, Lieutenant de Saint-Avit."

When we were alone, he poured out another huge cupfull of liqueur. The
ceiling of the room was lost in the gray smoke.

"What time is it?" I asked.

"After midnight. But you are not going to leave me like this, my dear
boy? I am heavy-hearted."

He wept bitterly. The tail of his coat spread out on the divan behind
him like the apple-green wings of a beetle.

"Isn't Aguida a beauty?" he went on, still weeping. "She makes me
think of the Countess de Teruel, though she is a little darker. You
know the Countess de Teruel, Mercedes, who went in bathing nude at
Biarritz, in front of the rock of the Virgin, one day when Prince
Bismarck was standing on the foot-bridge. You do not remember her?
Mercedes de Teruel."

I shrugged my shoulders.

"I forget; you must have been too young. Two, perhaps three years old.
A child. Yes, a child. Oh, my child, to have been of that generation
and to be reduced to playing cards with savages ... I must tell
you...."

I stood up and pushed him off.

"Stay, stay," he implored. "I will tell you everything you want to
know, how I came here, things I have never told anyone. Stay, I must
unbosom myself to a true friend. I will tell you everything, I repeat.
I trust you. You are a Frenchman, a gentleman. I know that you will
repeat nothing to her."

"That I will repeat nothing to her?... To whom?"

His voice stuck in his throat. I thought I saw a shudder of fear pass
over him.

"To her ... to Antinea," he murmured.

I sat down again.

XIII

THE HETMAN OF JITOMIR'S STORY

Count Casimir had reached that stage where drunkenness takes on a kind
of gravity, of regretfulness.

He thought a little, then began his story. I regret that I cannot
reproduce more perfectly its archaic flavor.

"When the grapes begin to color in Antinea's garden, I shall be
sixty-eight. It is very sad, my dear boy, to have sowed all your wild
oats. It isn't true that life is always beginning over again. How
bitter, to have known the Tuileries in 1860, and to have reached the
point where I am now!

"One evening, just before the war (I remember that Victor Black was
still living), some charming women whose names I need not disclose (I
read the names of their son