was a minute or two of silence, during which Bienville
seemed to probe for the meaning of the two laconic words. If anything
could be read from his countenance, it was doubt as to whether to
relinquish the prize with dignity or to pay its price in humiliation.
There was an instant in which he appeared to be bracing himself to do
the latter; but when he spoke his interrogation threw the responsibility
for decision on Miss Grimston.

"Have I received--my answer?"

She waited, finding it hard to give him his reply. It was as if forced
to it against her will that her head bent slowly in assent.

"Then," he said, in a tone of dignified regret, "there's nothing for me
but to wish Mademoiselle good-by."

He bowed separately to Miss Grimston and to Diane, and, with the
self-possession of a man accustomed to the various turns of drawing-room
drama, he left the room.

XVII

During the summer that followed these events Derek Pruyn set himself the
task of stamping the memory and influence of Diane Eveleth out of his
life. His sense of duty combined with his feelings of self-respect in
making the attempt. In reflecting on his last interview with her, he saw
the weakness of the stand he had taken in it, recoiling from so unworthy
a position with natural reaction. To have been in love at all at his age
struck him as humiliation enough; but to have been in love with that
sort of woman came very near mental malady. He said "that sort of
woman," because the vagueness of the term gave scope to the bitterness
of resentment with which he tried to overwhelm her. It enabled him to
create some such paradise of pain as that into which the souls of
Othello and Desdemona might have gone together. Had he been a Moor of
Venice he would doubtless have smothered her with a pillow; but being a
New York banker he could only try to slay the image, whose eyes and
voice had never haunted him so persistently as now. In his rage of
suffering he was as little able to take a reasoned view of the situation
as the maddened bull in the arena to appraise the skill of his
tormentors.

When in the middle of May he had retired to Rhinefields it was with the
intention of laying waste all that Diane had left behind in the course
of her brief passage through his life. The process being easier in the
exterior phases of existence than in those more secret and remote, he
determined to work from the outside inward. Wherever anything reminded
him of her, h