destroyed the last chance of ever mending matters.

Not even the payment of my wager and my return in my true character
could avail me now. The payment of my wager, forsooth! Even that lost
what virtue it might have contained. Where was the heroism of such an
act? Had I not failed, indeed? And was not, therefore, the payment of my
wager become inevitable?

Fool! fool! Why had I not profited that gentle mood of hers when we had
drifted down the stream together? Why had I not told her then of the
whole business from its ugly inception down to the pass to which things
were come, adding that to repair the evil I was going back to Paris to
pay my wager, and that when that was done, I would return to ask her to
become my wife? That was the course a man of sense would have adopted.
He would have seen the dangers that beset him in my false position,
and would have been quick to have forestalled them in the only manner
possible.

Heigh-ho! It was done. The game was at an end, and I had bungled my part
of it like any fool. One task remained me--that of meeting Marsac at
Grenade and doing justice to the memory of poor Lesperon. What might
betide thereafter mattered little. I should be ruined when I had settled
with Chatellerault, and Marcel de Saint-Pol, de Bardelys, that brilliant
star in the firmament of the Court of France, would suffer an abrupt
eclipse, would be quenched for all time. But this weighed little with
me then. I had lost everything that I might have valued--everything that
might have brought fresh zest to a jaded, satiated life.

Later that day I was told by the Vicomte that there was a rumour current
to the effect that the Marquis de Bardelys was dead. Idly I inquired how
the rumour had been spread, and he told me that a riderless horse, which
had been captured a few days ago by some peasants, had been recognized
by Monsieur de Bardelys's servants as belonging to their master, and
that as nothing had been seen or heard of him for a fortnight, it was
believed that he must have met with some mischance. Not even that piece
of information served to arouse my interest. Let them believe me dead
if they would. To him that is suffering worse than death to be accounted
dead is a small matter.

The next day passed without incident. Mademoiselle's absence continued
and I would have questioned the Vicomte concerning it, but a not
unnatural hesitancy beset me, and I refrained.

On the morrow I was to leave Lavedan, but