finger.

"The devil's in the knife!" I cried. "But that's the right way."

Judith said nothing, but bound up my wound, and, like the well-conducted
person of the ballad, went on cutting bread-and-butter. Her smile,
however, was provoking.

"And all this time," I said, half an hour later, "you haven't told me
where you are going."

"Paris. To stay with Delphine Carrere."

"I thought you said you wanted solitude."

I have met Delphine Carrere--_brave femme_ if ever there was one, and
the loyalest soul in the world, the only one of Judith's early women
friends who has totally ignored the fact of the Sacred Cap of Good
Repute having been thrown over the windmills (indeed who knows whether
dear, golden-hearted Delphine herself could conscientiously write the
magic initials S.C.G.R. after her name?); but Delphine has never struck
me as a person in whose dwelling one could find conventual seclusion.
Judith, however, explained.

"Delphine will be painting all day, and dissipating all night. I can't
possibly disturb her in her studio, for she has to work tremendously
hard--and I'm decidedly not going to dissipate with her. So I shall have
my days and nights to my sequestered and meditative self."

I said nothing: but all the same I am tolerably certain that Judith,
being Judith, will enjoy prodigious merrymaking in Paris. She is
absolutely sincere in her intentions--the earth holds no sincerer
woman--but she is a self-deceiver. Her about-to-be-sequestered and
meditative self was at that moment sitting on the arm of a chair and
smoking a cigarette, with undisguised relish of the good things of this
life. The blue smoke wreathing itself amid her fair hair resembled, so I
told her in the relaxed intellectual frame of mind of the contented man,
incense mounting through the nimbus of a saint. She affected solicitude
lest the life-blood of my intelligence should be pouring out through my
cut finger. No, I am convinced that the _recueillement_ (that beautiful
French word for which we have no English equivalent, meaning the
gathering of the soul together within itself) of the rue Boissy
d'Anglais is the very happiest delusion wherewith Judith has hitherto
deluded herself. I am glad, exceedingly glad. Her temperament--I have
got reconciled to her affliction--craves the gaiety which London denies
her.

"And when are you going?" I asked.

"To-morrow."

"To-morrow?"

"Why not? I wired Delphine this morning. I had to go out