esser Diavolo, I am not Paphnutius. I
will not maim myself, nor do I want Carlotta to fall dead; and I cannot
pray and effect a pietistic resurrection. I am simply a fool of a modern
man tempted out of his wits, who scarce knows what it is that he speaks
or writes.

I am not superstitious, but I feel myself to-night on the brink of some
disaster. I walk restlessly about the room. On the mantel-piece are
three photographs in silver frames: Judith, Carlotta, Pasquale. That
which is of mockery in the spirit of each seems to-night to be hovering
round the portraits and to be making sport of me. An autumn gale is
howling among the trees outside, like a legion of lost souls. Listen.
Messer Diavolo himself might be riding by with a whoop of derision.

CHAPTER XV

October 26th.

I knew something would happen. Messer Diavolo does not ride whooping to
no purpose by the windows of people whom he desires to torment; nor does
he inspire photographs for nothing with an active spirit of mockery.

We dined at the Trocadero. Carlotta loves the band and the buzz of Babel
and the heavy scents and the clatter and the tumult and the glare of
light; otherwise I should have chosen a discreeter hostelry where the
footfalls of the waiting-men were noiseless and the walls in quiet
shadow, where there was nothing but the mellow talk of friends to
distract the mind from the consideration of exquisite flavours. But in
these palaces of clashing splendour, the stunned brain fails to receive
impressions from the glossopharyngeal nerve, and one eats unthinkingly
like a dog. But this matters little to Carlotta. Perhaps when I was
nineteen it mattered little to me. And to-night, also, it mattered
little, for my mind was preoccupied and a dinner with Lucullus would
have been savourless.

If the Psalmist cried, "What is man that Thou art mindful of him?" what
cry had he at the back of his head to utter concerning woman? Did he
leave her to be implicitly dealt with by Charles Darwin in his "Theory
of Sexual Selection"? Or did he in the good old oriental way regard
her as unimportant in the eyes of the Deity? If the latter, he was a
purblind prophet and missed the very fount of human tears.

When I looked at Judith, I was smitten with a great pain. She had not
looked so young, so fresh, so fragilely fair for many months. She wore
a dress of corn-flower blue that deepened the violet of her eyes. In the
mass of flax hued thistle-down that is