if she could arrange
by cable for some one else whom she would trust with her treasures. No, I
guess you'll have to stay."

"I _wish_ I hadn't taken this place!" she exclaimed. It was the first
confession of what her real, her sane and intelligent self had been
proclaiming loudly since the first flush of interest and pleasure in
her "borrowed plumage" had receded. "Why _do_ you let me make a fool
of myself?"

"No use going into that," replied he, on guard not to take too seriously
this belated penitence. He was used to Del's fits of remorse, so used to
them that he thought them less valuable than they really were, or might
have been had he understood her better--or, not bothered about trying to
understand her. "I shan't be away long, I imagine," he went on, "and I'll
have to rush round from England to France, to Germany, to Austria, to
Switzerland. All that would be exhausting for you, and only a little of
the time pleasant."

His words sounded to her like a tolling over the grave of that former
friendship and comradeship of theirs. "I really believe you'll be glad to
get away alone," cried she, lips smiling raillery, eyes full of tears.

"Do you think so?" said Dory, as if tossing back her jest. But both knew
the truth, and each knew that the other knew it. He was as glad to escape
from those surroundings as she to be relieved of a presence which edged
on her other-self to scoff and rail and sneer at her. It had become
bitterness to him to enter the gates of the Villa d'Orsay. His nerves
were so wrought up that to look about the magnificent but too
palace-like, too hotel-like rooms was to struggle with a longing to run
amuck and pause not until he had reduced the splendor to smithereens. And
in that injustice of chronic self-excuse which characterizes all human
beings who do not live by intelligently formed and intelligently executed
plan, she was now trying to soothe herself with blaming him for her low
spirits; in fact, they were wholly the result of her consciously unworthy
mode of life, and of an incessant internal warfare, exhausting and
depressing. Also, the day would surely come when he would ask how she was
contriving to keep up such imposing appearances on their eighteen hundred
a year; and then she would have to choose between directly deceiving him
and telling him that she had broken--no, not broken, that was too
harsh--rather, had not yet fulfilled the promise to give up the income
her father left her.