eeded and five minutes later stood shamefacedly in the presence of
the woman who had made him King. She was more than usually beautiful,
and as always her beauty and personality dominated him, swayed his
senses like music. It was so easy to slip into the impetuous attitude
of the lover; so difficult to maintain the austere one of the Monarch.

Delgado nerved himself and began.

How he said it or what he said, he did not himself know when the words
had been spoken. He rushed through the speech he had prepared like a
frightened child at recitation and waited for the outburst of her anger.
He waited in vain.

Marie Astaride had plotted, had consented to every infamy which had been
suggested as necessary to bring the man she loved to the Crown.

Now she was silent.

The man looked up when he had waited a seeming century for the expected
torrent of reproach.

She was standing supporting herself upon her downward stretched arms,
her hands resting on the table. Her face was pallid and her magnificent
figure rigid. The scarlet fullness of her lips had gone bloodless. Her
eyes were stupefied.

At length she straightened herself, let go her support upon the table
and went slowly like a sleep-walker from the room. She had not spoken.
She had not said good-by, but Louis Delgado knew that she had walked out
of his life.

* * * * *

That evening Monsieur Jusseret of the French _Cabinet Noir_ met, as if
by chance, young Lieutenant Lapas, who was now high in the favor of the
new government. Jusseret knew that the lure which had drawn young Lapas
away from the confidence of Karyl to the uncertain standard of Delgado
had been the influence of the Countess Astaride. He knew that Lapas
loved her hopelessly, willing even in her name to serve the greater man
who loved her more successfully. His attachment was that of the boy for
the woman who is mistress of all the mature arts of charm. This love
could be turned into the fanatic's zeal; this boy could be led to the
extreme of martyrdom, if the strings of his characterless nature were
played upon with a skill sufficiently consummate. Jusseret knew also a
number of other things. He knew that whereas he had, to all seeming,
brought a difficult task to completion, he was in reality not yet half
through. His own vision went farther into the future, and recognized in
the present only a mile-post far from the ultimate.

He led Lapas to his own rooms. He wa