ight, and thought, almost
wistfully, "If the Jews were down on me to-morrow, would she really
care, I wonder?"

Really care? Bertie knew his world and its women too well to deceive
himself in his heart about the answer. Nevertheless, he asked the
question. "Would you care much, chere belle?"

"Care what?"

"If I came to grief--went to the bad, you know; dropped out of the world
altogether?"

She raised her splendid eyes in amaze, with a delicate shudder through
all her laces. "Bertie! You would break my heart! What can you dream
of?"

"Oh, lots of us end so! How is a man to end?" answered Bertie
philosophically, while his thoughts still ran off in a speculative
skepticism. "Is there a heart to break?"

Her ladyship looked at him an laughed.

"A Werther in the Guards! I don't think the role will suit either you
or your corps, Bertie; but if you do it, pray do it artistically. I
remember, last year, driving through Asnieres, when they had found a
young man in the Seine; he was very handsome, beautifully dressed, and
he held fast in his clinched hand a lock of gold hair. Now, there was a
man who knew how to die gracefully, and make his death an idyl!"

"Died for a woman?--ah!" murmured Bertie, with the Brummel nonchalance
of his order. "I don't think I should do that, even for you--not, at
least, while I had a cigar left."

And then the boat drifted backward, while the stars grew brighter
and the last reflection of the sun died out; and they planned to meet
to-morrow, and talked of Baden, and sketched projects for the winter
in Paris, and went in and sat by the window, taking their coffee, and
feeling, in a half-vague pleasure, the heliotrope-scented air blowing
softly in from the garden below, and the quiet of the starlit river in
the summer evening, with a white sail gleaming here and there, or the
gentle splash of an oar following on the swift trail of a steamer; the
quiet, so still and so strange after the crowded rush of the London
season.

"Would she really care?" thought Cecil, once more. In that moment he
could have wished to think she would.

But heliotrope, stars, and a river, even though it had been tawny and
classical Tiber instead of ill-used and inodorous Thames, were not
things sufficiently in the way of either of them to detain them long.
They had both seen the Babylonian sun set over the ruins of the Birs
Nimrud, and had talked of Paris fashions while they did so; they had
both leaned over