ax said.

"How are you going to decide? Shall you take my advice, keep your place
in this world, and give her money, if you find her? And most likely you
never can. It's such a long time ago." Rose's voice dragged. It was very
small and weak, very tired.

"It's your advice for me to do that?" Max asked, almost incredulously.
"And yet--she's your own child, _his_ child."

"Not the child of our souls. You'll see what I mean, if you ever see
her. Think it over--a few minutes, and then tell me. I feel--somehow I
should like to know, before going. Wake me--in ten minutes. I think I
could sleep--till then. Such a rest, since I told you! No pain."

"Oughtn't I to call the doctor?" Max half rose from his chair by the
bedside.

"No, no. I want nothing--except to sleep--for ten minutes. Can you
decide--in ten minutes?"

"Yes."

"You promise to wake me then?"

"Yes," Max said again.

For ten minutes there was silence in the room, save for a little sound
of crackling wood in the open fire that Rose had always loved.

Max had decided, and the time had come to keep his promise. He must
speak, to wake the sleeper. But he did not know what to call her. She
said that she had never loved him as a son. She must always have felt
irritated when he dared to address her as "Dearest"--he, the little
French _bourgeois_. She would hate it now.

"Rose!" he whispered. Then a little louder, "Rose!"

She did not answer.

He would not have to tell her his decision. But perhaps she knew.

CHAPTER III

THE LAST ACT OF "GIRLS' LOVE"

The wail of grief that echoed through New York for Rose Doran, suddenly
snatched from life in the prime of her beauty, sounded in the ears of
Max a warning note. Her memory must not be smirched. And then again came
the temptation. As she lay dying he had decided what to do. But now that
she was dead, now that letters and telegrams by the hundred, and visits
of sympathy, and columns in the newspapers, were making him realize more
and more her place in the world she had left, and the height of the
pedestal on which the Doran family stood, the question repeated itself
insistently: Why not reconsider?

Max had thought from time to time that he knew what temptation was; but
now he saw that he had never known. His safeguard used to be in calling
up his father's image to stand by him, in listening for the tones of a
beloved voice which had the power to calm his hot temper, or hold him
back from some