creature ceased its cries, and in apparent alarm
ran half-way along the passage and sat down beside a small hole in the
wall. From this position it regarded the intruder with solemn,
apprehensive eyes. Dieppe, holding his door wide open, returned the
animal's stare. This must be the cat which had ejected the Count. But
why--?

In a moment the half-formed question found its answer, though the
answer seemed rather to ask a new riddle than to answer the old one. A
door at the other end of the passage opened a little way, and a
melodious voice called softly, "Papa, papa!" The cat ran towards the
speaker, the door was opened wide, and for an instant Dieppe had the
vision of a beautiful young woman, clad in a white dressing-gown and
with hair about her shoulders. As he saw her she saw him, and gave a
startled shriek. The cat, apparently bewildered, raced back to the
aperture in the wall and disappeared with an agitated whisk of its
tail. The lady's door and the Captain's closed with a double
simultaneous reverberating bang, and the Captain drove his bolts home
with guilty haste.

His first act was to smoke a cigarette. That done, he began to undress
slowly and almost unconsciously. During the process he repeated to
himself more than once the Count's measured but emphatic words: "A
person whom I particularly wish to avoid." The words died away as
Dieppe climbed into the big four-poster with a wrinkle of annoyance on
his brow.

For the lady at the other end of the passage did not, to the Captain's
mind, look the sort of person whom a handsome and lonely young man
would particularly wish to avoid. In spite of the shortness of his
vision, in spite of her obvious alarm and confusion, she had, in fact,
seemed, to him very much indeed the opposite.

CHAPTER II

THE MAN BY THE STREAM

Apart from personal hopes or designs, the presence, or even the
proximity, of a beautiful woman is a cheerful thing: it gives a man the
sense of happiness, like sunshine or sparkling water; these are not his
either, but he can look at and enjoy them; he smiles back at the world
in thanks for its bountiful favours. Never had life seemed better to
Dieppe than when he awoke the next morning; yet there was guilt on his
conscience--he ought not to have opened that door. But the guilt
became parent to a new pleasure and gave him the one thing needful to
perfection of existence--a pretty little secret of his own, and this
time one