gs,
she scarcely entered.

She broke one of these fits suddenly and called me by her own pet
version of my name. I looked up from the writing-table where I was
studying the Arabic grammar.

"Yes?"

"I have been thinking--oh, thinking, thinking so long. I've been
thinking that you must love me very much."

"Yes, Carlotta," said I, with a half smile. "I suppose I do."

"As much as I loved my baby," she said, seriously,

"I used to love you in a different way, perhaps."

"And now?"

"Perhaps in the same sort of way, Carlotta."

"I loved my baby because it was mine," she remarked, looking at the
flames through one hand's delicate fingers. "I wanted to do everything
for him and didn't want him to do anything for me. I would have died
for him. It is so strange. Yes, I think you must love me like that, Seer
Marcous. Why?"

"Because when I found you in the Embankment Gardens nearly two years
ago you were about as helpless as your little baby," I replied, somewhat
disingenuously.

Carlotta gave me a quick glance.

"You thought me then what you call an infernal nuisance. Oh, I know now.
I have grown wise. But you were always good. You looked good when you
sat on the seat. You were reading a dirty little book."

"_L'Histoire des Uscoques,_" I murmured. How far away it seemed.

There was a pause. I regarded her for a moment or two. She was sunk
again in serious reflection. I sighed--at the general dismalness of
life, I suppose--and resumed my Arabic.

"Seer Marcous."

"Yes?"

"Why didn't you drive me away when I came back?"

I shut up the Arabic grammar and went and sat beside her on the
fenderstool.

"My dear little girl--what a question! How could I drive you away from
your own home?"

She flashed a queer, scared look at me, then at the fire, then at me
again and then burst out crying, her head and arms on her knees.

I muttered a man's words of awkward comfort, saying something about the
baby.

"It isn't baby I'm crying about," sobbed Carlotta. "It's me! And it's
you! And it's all the things I'm beginning to understand."

I patted her head and lit a cigarette and wandered about the room,
rather puzzled by Carlotta's psychological development, and yet stirred
by a faint thrill at her recognition of my affection. At the same time
the sad "too late, too late," was knelled in my ears, and I thought of
the might-have-been, and rode the merry-go-round of regret's banalities.
I had grown old. Passion ha