scaped! He----"

"Oh dry up, Murgie," said Driscoll, coming down the steps. "He's gone
back to his room, I reckon."

CHAPTER XXI

THE TITLE OF NOBILITY

"Hear, therefore, O ye kings, and understand."
--_Wisdom of Solomon._

One more sunset, one more sunrise! And then?...

Maximilian again confronted the ghostly enumeration. But this time his
last day should be the day of a man's work, in simple-hearted humility.
He no more searched the skies to find a supernal finger there. He let
Destiny alone, and did his best instead. For a man's best is Destiny's
peer.

The fiery June sun was dying in its larger shell of bronze over the
western sierras, and the self-same blue that vaults beautiful Tuscany was
taking on its richer, darker hue, when a foreigner in the land, Din
Driscoll, walked under the Alameda trees, his pipe cold in his mouth, he
perplexed before his heavy spirits. For he no longer had war to
distract, to engross.

Maximilian's physician, an Austrian, found him in his reverie. Would the
Herr Americano at once repair to His Highness attend? The senor's
presence would a favor be esteemed, in reason that a witness was greatly
necessitated.

Wondering not a little, Driscoll hastened back into the town. As the
physician did not follow, he arrived alone. But in the door of the
archduke's cell he stopped, angry and embarrassed. For his eyes
encountered a second pair, which were no less angry, which moreover,
were Jacqueline's. Maximilian and Padre Soria, the father confessor,
were also there, but Driscoll at first saw no one but Jacqueline. As
with him, she had been vaguely summoned, without knowing why. A last
testament was to be signed, she imagined, but in his choice of witnesses
she thought that Maximilian might at least have shown more delicacy. As
to cruelty also, she would not confess, but cruelty it was,
nevertheless. To see again this American was to know memory quickened
into torture, and days afterward there would still be with her, vividly,
hatefully, the beloved awkwardness of his strong frame, the splendid,
roguish head, now so forbidding, and more than all, the way he smiled of
late. It was a smile so cold, so cheerless, a something so changed in
him since the old, piquant days of their first acquaintance. Despise
herself as she might, Jacqueline knew how the sight of the man halted
there would leave her whole woman's being athirst and panting.

Maximilian's