iciently informed. But I saw him--I saw them both--within a
week of their return. Upon that occasion I dined at a hotel with two
friends, Captain Vaucher and Lieutenant de Sailles. Bertin, with some
friends and his wife, was at a table near-by. She was the only lady
of the party; her place was between an Englishman, a lean, twisted
man with the thin legs of a groom, and a Belgian who passed for an
artist. It was de Sailles who pointed them out; and in effect it was
a group to see with emotion. The lady--she was known to you, Madame?
Then the position will be clear. She was of that complete and perfect
type we honor as the Parisienne, a product of the most complex life
in the world. She was slender and straight--ah! straight as a lance,
with youth and spirit and buoyancy in the carriage of her head, the
poise of her body, the color upon her cheeks. But it was not that--
the beauty and the courage--that caused her to stand out among those
men as a climbing rose stands out from an old wall; it was the
schooled and perfected quality of her, the fineness and delicacy of
her manner and expression, the--in short, the note of breeding,
Madame, the unmistakable ensign of caste. The Englishman fidgeted and
lounged beside her; the fat Belgian drank much and was boisterous;
Bertin was harsh and rudely jovial and loud. It was as though she
were enveloped in a miasma."

"'So that is what Bertin has brought back,' said Vaucher slowly, as
his custom was."

"'It is a crime,' said de Sailles."

"'I wonder,' said Vaucher, and drank his wine. He was much my friend,
a man with the courage and innocence of a good child; but his thought
was not easy to follow. He gave Bertin's group another look under
puckered brows, and then turned his back on it and began to talk of
other matters. I might have known then that--but I must tell my tale
in order."

"Bertin was not wise--if it were nothing more--to bring such a wife
to Algiers. It turned eyes upon him. Those who had been aware of him
merely as a man of low tastes now began to notice his particular
actions. He had a house in a certain impasse, and one night there was
a brawl there--an affair of a man drunk and angry, of a knife drawn
and some one stabbed. Before, it might have passed; our discipline
was indulgent; but now it took on the shape of a scandal. It was
brief and ugly, but it marked a stage passed in Bertin's career. And
it was only two days later that Vaucher came to me in my qua