t this table. Monsieur would do well to take no notice."

I laughed. I was thirty years old, and the love of adventure was
always in my blood. For the first time for many days the weariness
seemed to have passed away. My heart was beating. I was ready for any
enterprise.

"Do not be afraid, Louis," I said. "I shall come to no harm. If
mademoiselle looks at me, it is not gallant to look away."

Louis' face was puckered up with anxiety. He saw, too, what I had
seen. Bartot had walked to the other end of the room to speak to some
friends. The girl had taken a gold and jewelled pencil from the mass
of costly trifles which lay with her purse upon the table, and was
writing on a piece of paper which the waiter had brought. I could see
her delicately manicured fingers, the blue veins at the back of her
hands, as she wrote, slowly and apparently without hesitation. Both
Louis and myself watched the writing of that note as though Fate
itself were guiding the pencil.

"It is for you," Louis whispered in my ear. "Take no notice. It would
be madness even to look at her."

"Louis!" I exclaimed protestingly.

"I mean what I say, monsieur," Louis declared, leaning toward me, and
speaking in a low, earnest whisper. "The cafe below, the streets
throughout this region, are peopled by his creatures. In an hour he
could lead an army which would defy the whole of the gendarmes in
Paris. This quarter of the city is his absolutely to do with what he
wills. Do you believe that you would have a chance if he thought that
she had looked twice at you,--she--Susette--the only woman who has
ever led him? I tell you that he is mad with love and jealousy for
her. The whole world knows of it."

"My dear Louis," I said, "you know me only in London, where I come and
sit in your restaurant and eat and drink there. To you I am simply
like all those others who come to you day by day,--idlers and pleasure
seekers. Let me assure you, Louis, that there are other things in my
life. Just now I should welcome anything in the world which meant
adventure, which could teach me to forget."

"But monsieur need not seek the suicide," Louis said. "There are
hundreds of adventures to be had without that."

I shrugged my shoulders.

"If mademoiselle should send me the note," I said, "surely it would
not be gallant of me to refuse to accept it."

"There are other ways of seeking adventures," Louis said, "than by
ending one's days in the Seine."

The girl by