gs that has happened to him. One might have guessed it,
hein?--a life like that! Ah, my friend, there is one who has put out
his hours at usury. What memories he must have!"

O'Neill grunted, with his eyes on the bed. "He's had a beastly life,
if that's what you mean," he said, "Who was the woman?'

"One might almost have guessed that, too," said Buscarlet. He rose.
"Come and see," he said.

There was a recess beside the great mantelpiece, and in it hung
Regnault's famous picture, "The Dancer," all scarlet frock and white
flesh against an amber background.

"That?" exclaimed O'Neill. "Lola?"

Buscarlet nodded; he had forced a good effect.

"That is she," he answered.

The picture was familiar to O'Neill; to him, as to many another young
painter of that time, it was an upstanding landmark on the road of
art. He looked at it now, in the sparse light from the bedside lamp,
with a fresh interest in its significance. He saw with new
understanding the conventionalism of the pose--hip thrust out, arm
akimbo, shoulder cocked--contrasted against the dark vivacity of the
face and all the pulsing opulence of the flesh. It was an epic, an
epic of the savage triumphant against civilization, of the spirit
victorious against the forms of art.

He stared at it, Buscarlet smiling mildly at his elbow; then he
turned away and went back to his seat. The face on the bed was
unchanged.

"So Regnault married Lola!" he said slowly. "When?"

"Ah, who knows?" Buscarlet shrugged graphically. "Many years ago, of
course. It is twenty years since she danced."

"And what was he saying about her?" asked O'Neill.

"Nothing to any purpose," replied Buscarlet. "I think he had been
dreaming of her. You know the manner he has of waking up--coming back
to consciousness with eyes wide open and his mind alert, with no
interval of drowsiness and reluctance? Yes? Well, he woke like that
before I knew he had ceased to sleep. 'I should like to see her now,'
he said. 'Whom?' I asked, and he smiled. 'Lola,' he answered, and he
went on to say that she was the one woman he had never understood.
'That was her advantage,' he said, smiling still; 'for she understood
me; yes, she knew me as if she had made me.' After a while, he smiled
again, and said, 'Yes, I should like to see her now.'"

O'Neill frowned thoughtfully. "Well, she ought to be here if she's
his wife," he said. "Is she in Paris, d'you know? We might send for
her."

"I do not know," repli