es."

Colville turned and glanced at him sideways, though it was too dark to
see his face.

"I should have thought," he said, tentatively, after a while, "that it
would have been wise to accept. A bird in the hand, you know--a damned
big bird! And then afterwards you could see what turned up."

"You mean I could break my word later on," inquired Barebone, with that
odd downrightness which at times surprised Colville and made him think
of Captain Clubbe.

"Well, you know," he explained, with a tolerant laugh, "in politics it
often turns out that a man's duty is to break his word--duty toward his
party, and his country, and that sort of thing."

Which was plausible enough, as many eminent politicians seem to have
found in these later times.

"I dare say it may be so," answered Barebone, "but I refused outright,
and there is an end to it."

For now that he was brought face to face with the situation, shorn of
side issues and set squarely before him, he envisaged it clearly enough.
He did not want fifty thousand pounds. He had only wanted the money for
a moment because the thought leapt into his mind that fifty thousand
pounds meant Miriam. Then he saw that little contemptuous smile tilting
the corner of her lips, and he had no use for a million.

If he could not have Miriam, he would be King of France. It is thus
that history is made, for those who make it are only men. And Clio,
that greatest of the daughters of Zeus, about whose feet cluster all the
famous names of the makers of this world's story, has, after all, only
had the reversion of the earth's great men. She has taken them after
some forgotten woman of their own choosing has had the first refusal.

Thus it came about that the friendship so nearly severed one evening
at the Hotel Gemosac, in Paris, was renewed after a few months; and
Barebone felt assured once more that no one was so well disposed toward
him as Dormer Colville.

There was no formal reconciliation, and neither deemed it necessary to
refer to the past. Colville, it will be remembered, was an adept at
that graceful tactfulness which is somewhat clumsily described by this
tolerant generation as going on as if nothing had happened.

By the time that the waning moon was high enough in the eastern sky to
shed an appreciable light upon their path, they reached the junction of
the two roads and set off at a brisk pace southward toward Ipswich. So
far as the eye could reach, the wide heath was