had affected my brain.

"Consider, my son," said he, "that when I returned last night, I found
you fast asleep on the doorstep, and you never woke up till this
morning."

From this I gathered that for the second time he had dosed the book of
his life to my prying though innocent eyes. I also learned the peculiar
difference between Philip drunk and Philip sober.

When our engagement at Aix was at an end, the proprietor of the
restaurant desired to renew it, but Paragot declined. The sick violinist
whom we had replaced had recovered and Paragot had seen him on the quay
looking through the railings with the hungry eyes of a sort of musical
Enoch Arden. Blanquette had some little difficulty in preventing him
from rushing out there and then and delivering his fiddle into the
other's hands. It was necessary to be reasonable, she said.

"_Nom de Dieu!_" he cried, "if I were reasonable I should be lost.
Reason would set me down in Paris with gloves and an umbrella. Reason
would implant a sunny smile on my face above the red ribbon of the
Legion of Honour. It would marry me to the daughter of one of my
_confreres_ at the Academie des Beaux Arts. It would make me procreate
my species, _cre nom de Dieu_! It would make me send you and Asticot and
Narcisse to the devil. If I were reasonable I should not be Paragot. The
man who lives according to reason has the heart of a sewing-machine."

But out of regard for Blanquette he served his time faithfully at the
Restaurant du Lac, and reconciled his conscience with reason by giving
the hungry violinist his own share of the takings. It was only when
Blanquette suggested the further exploitation of Aix that he showed his
Gascon obduracy. If there was one place in the world where the soul
sickened and festered it was Aix-les-Bains. Mammon was King thereof and
Astarte Queen. He was going to fiddle no more for sons of Belial and
daughters of Aholah. He had set out to travel to the Heart of Truth, and
the way thither did not lead through the Inner Shrine of Dagon and
Astaroth. Blanquette did not in the least know what he was talking
about, and I only had a vague glimmer of his meaning. But I see now that
his sensitive nature chafed at the false position. Among the simple
village folk he was a personality, compelling awe and admiration. Among
the idlers of Aix, whom in his loftiness he despised, he was but the
fiddling mountebank to whom any greasy wallower in riches could cast a
disdainf