s your friends will come forward."

And he looked calmly toward Colville. Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence's face
suddenly flushed, and she turned away toward the door. Turner rose,
laboriously, and opened it.

"There is another staircase through this side door," he said, opening a
second door, which had the appearance of a cupboard. "You can avoid the
crowd."

They passed out together, and Turner, having closed the door behind
them, crossed the room to where a small mirror was suspended. He set his
tie straight and smoothed his hair, and then returned to his chair, with
a vague smile on his face.

Colville took the vacant seat in Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence's brougham.
She still held a handkerchief in her hand.

"I do not mind for myself," she exclaimed, suddenly, when the carriage
moved out of the court-yard. "It is only for your sake, Dormer."

She turned and glanced at him with eyes that shone, but not with tears.

"Oh! Don't you understand?" she asked, in a whisper. "Don't you see,
Dormer?"

"A way out of it?" he answered, hurriedly, almost interrupting her.
He withdrew his hand, upon which she had laid her own; withdrew it
sympathetically, almost tenderly. "See a way out of it?" he repeated, in
a reflective and business-like voice. "No, I am afraid, for the moment,
I don't."

He sat stroking his moustache, looking out of the window, while she
looked out of the other, resolutely blinking back her tears. They drove
back to her hotel without speaking.

CHAPTER XXXIV. A SORDID MATTER

"Bon Dieu! my old friend, what do you expect?" replied Madame de
Chantonnay to a rather incoherent statement made to her one May
afternoon by the Marquis de Gemosac. "It is the month of May," she
further explained, indicating with a gesture of her dimpled hand the
roses abloom all around them. For the Marquis had found her in a chair
beneath the mulberry-tree in the old garden of that house near Gemosac
which looks across the river toward the sea. "It is the month of May.
One is young. Such things have happened since the world began. They
will happen until it ends, Marquis. It happened in our own time, if I
remember correctly."

And Madame de Chantonnay heaved a prodigious sigh, in memory of the days
that were no more.

"Given a young man of enterprise and not bad looking, I allow. He has
the grand air and his face is not without distinction. Given a young
girl, fresh as a flower, young, innocent, not without feeling. Ah!