ier, leaning down and up, exchanged sibilant and almost
simultaneous hushes.

Max Elliot heard them quite distinctly. They were the only part of the
conversation which reached him.

He was an old friend of Adelaide, and was devoted to the Senniers and to
their cause. But he did not quite like this expedition. He realized that
these charming women, whom he was escorting to a barbaric city, were
driven by curiosity, and that in their curiosity there was something
secretly hostile. He wished they had stayed at Mustapha, and had decided
to leave Claude Heath alone with his violent librettist. Elliot greatly
disliked the active hostility to artists often shown by the partisans of
other artists. There was no question, of course, of any rivalry between
Heath, an almost unknown man, and Sennier, a man now of world-wide fame.
Yet these two women were certainly on the qui vive. It was very absurd,
he thought. But it was also rather disagreeable to him. He began to wish
that Henriette were not so almost viciously determined to keep the path
clear for her husband. The wife of a little man might well be afraid of
every possible rival. But Sennier was not a little man.

Elliot did not understand either the nature of Henriette's heart or the
nature of her mind. Nor did he know her origin. In fact, he knew very
little about her.

She was just fifty, and had been for a time a governess in a merchant's
family in Marseilles. This occupation she had quitted with an abruptness
that had not been intentional. In fact, she had been turned out.
Afterward she had remained in Marseilles, but not as a governess.
Finally she had married Jacques Sennier. She was low-born, but had been
very well educated, and was naturally clever. Her cleverness had
throughout her life instinctively sought an outlet in intrigue. Some
women intrigue when circumstances drive them to subterfuge, trickery and
underhand dealing. Henriette Sennier needed no incentive of that kind.
She liked intrigue for its own sake. In Marseilles she had lived in the
midst of a network of double dealing connected with so-called love. When
she married Jacques Sennier she had exchanged it for intrigue connected
with art. She was by nature suspicious and inquisitive, generally unable
to trust because she was untrustworthy. But her devotion to her Jacques
was sincere and concentrated. It helped to make her cruel, but it helped
to make her strong. She was incapable of betraying Jacques, but