ew late, and Derek Pruyn still sat in the position in which Diane
had left him. His hands rested clinched on the desk before him, while
his eyes stared vacantly at the cluster of electric lights overhead. He
was living through the conversations with Bienville on shipboard. He
began with the first time he had noticed the tall, brown-eyed,
black-bearded young Frenchman on the day when they sailed out of the
harbor of Rio de Janeiro. He passed on to their first interchange of
casual remarks, leaning together over the deck-rail, and watching the
lights of Para recede into the darkness. It was in the hot, still evenings
in the Caribbean Sea that, smoking in neighboring deck-chairs, they had
first drifted into intimate talk, and the young man had begun to unburden
himself. They had been distinctly interesting to Derek, these glimpses
of a joyous, idle, light-o'-love life, with a tragic element never very
far below its surface, so different from his own gray career of
business. They not only beguiled the tedious nights, but they opened up
vistas of romance to an imagination growing dull before its time, in the
seriousness of large practical affairs. In proportion as the young
Frenchman showed himself willing to narrate, Derek became a sympathetic
listener. As Bienville told of his pursuit, now of this fair face, and
now of that, Derek received the impression of a chase, in which the
hunted engages not of necessity, but, like Atalanta, in sheer glee of
excitement. Like Atalanta, too, she was apt to over-estimate her speed,
and to end in being caught.

It was not till after he had recounted a number of _petites histoires_,
more or less amusing, that Bienville came to what he called "_l'affaire
la plus serieuse de ma vie,_" while Derek drank in the tale with all the
avidity the jealous heart brings to the augmentation of its pain. To the
idealizing purity of his conception of Diane any earthly failing on her
part became the extremity of sin. He had placed her so high that when
she fell it was to no middle flight of guilt; as to the fallen angel,
there was no choice for her, in his estimation, between heaven and the
nether hell.

Outwardly he was an ordinary passenger, smoking quietly in a deck-chair,
in order to pass the time between dinner and the hour for "turning in."
His voice, as he plied Bienville with questions, betrayed his emotions
no more than the darkened surface of the sea gave evidence of the raging
life within its