r, valor, fire,'" Celeste repeated slowly. "Yes, that is
Nora." A bitter little smile moved her lips as she recalled the happenings
of the last two days. But no; he must find out for himself; he must meet
the hurt from Nora, not from her. "How long, Abbott, have you known your
friend Mr. Courtlandt?"

"Boys together," playing a light tattoo with his mahl-stick.

"How old is he?"

"About thirty-two or three."

"He is very rich?"

"Oceans of money; throws it away, but not fast enough to get rid of it."

"He is what you say in English ... wild?"

"Well," with mock gravity, "I shouldn't like to be the tiger that crossed
his path. Wild; that's the word for it."

"You are laughing. Ah, I know! I should say dissipated."

"Courtlandt? Come, now, Celeste; does he look dissipated?"

"No-o."

"He drinks when he chooses, he flirts with a pretty woman when he chooses,
he smokes the finest tobacco there is when he chooses; and he gives them
all up when he chooses. He is like the seasons; he comes and goes, and
nobody can change his habits."

"He has had no affair?"

"Why, Courtlandt hasn't any heart. It's a mechanical device to keep his
blood in circulation; that's all. I am the most intimate friend he has,
and yet I know no more than you how he lives and where he goes."

She let her hand fall from his shoulder. She was glad that he did not
know.

"But look!" she cried in warning.

Abbott looked.

A woman was coming serenely down the path from the wooded promontory, a
woman undeniably handsome in a cedar-tinted linen dress, exquisitely
fashioned, with a touch of vivid scarlet on her hat and a most tantalizing
flash of scarlet ankle. It was Flora Desimone, fresh from her morning bath
and a substantial breakfast. The errand that had brought her from
Aix-les-Bains was confessedly a merciful one. But she possessed the
dramatist's instinct to prolong a situation. Thus, to make her act of
mercy seem infinitely larger than it was, she was determined first to cast
the Apple of Discord into this charming corner of Eden. The Apple of
Discord, as every man knows, is the only thing a woman can throw with any
accuracy.

The artist snatched up his brushes, and ruined the painting forthwith, for
all time. The foreground was, in his opinion, beyond redemption; so, with
a savage humor, he rapidly limned in a score of impossible trees, turned
midday into sunset, with a riot of colors which would have made the
Chinese New-year i