et and windy
night, when the autumn leaves were coming down in swirling hosts on
the lawns and paths of Trianon.

Fenwick was hard at work, in the small apartment which he occupied
on the third floor of the Hotel des Reservoirs. It consisted of a
sitting-room and two bedrooms looking on an inner _cour_. One of
the bedrooms he had turned into a sort of studio. It was now full of
drawings and designs for the sumptuous London 'production' on which
he was engaged--rooms at Versailles and Trianon--views in the Trianon
gardens--fragments of decoration--designs for stage grouping--for the
reproduction of one of the famous _fetes de nuit_ in the gardens of
the 'Hameau'--studies of costume even.

His proud ambition hated the work; he thought it unworthy of him;
only his poverty had consented. But he kept it out of sight of his
companions as much as he could, and worked as much as possible at
night.

And here and there, amongst the rest, were the sketches and fragments,
often the grandiose fragments, which represented his 'buried
life'--the life which only Eugenie de Pastourelles seemed now to have
the power to evoke. When some hours of other work had weakened the
impulse received from her, he would look at these things sadly, and
put them aside.

To-night, as he drew, he was thinking incessantly of Eugenie; pierced
often by intolerable remorse. But whose fault was it? Will you ask a
man, perishing of need, to put its satisfaction from him? The tests of
life are too hard. The plain, selfish man must always fail under them.
Why act and speak as though he were responsible for what Nature and
the flesh impose?

But how was it all to end?--that was what tormented him. His
conscience shrank from the half-perceived villainies before him; but
his will failed him. What was the use of talking? He was the slave
of an impulse, which was not passion, which had none of the excuse of
passion, but represented rather the blind search of a man who, like a
child in the dark, recoils in reckless terror from loneliness and the
phantoms of his own mind.

Eleven o'clock struck. He was busying himself with a cardboard model,
on which he had been trying the effect of certain arrangements, when
he heard a knock at his door.

'_Entrez_!' he said, in astonishment.

At this season of the year the hotel kept early hours, and there was
not a light to be seen in the _cour_.

The door opened. On the threshold stood Arthur Welby. Fenwick gazed at
h