He agreed to part from his beloved. But he asked that she might sit for me, and would sometimes muse for hours over the[Pg 15] latest travail of my brush. Then he became engaged to the Countess Dahlic—there is no accounting for the moral weakness of men under family pressure—and the wedding day was fixed. All this time he had kept his word. He had never spoken to or seen Gretchen, and she, poor child, was dying—yes, dying slowly—not as we die, but fading like twilight, imperceptibly, fainting like high purpose, blighted by the coarse breath of the million."

[Pg 15]

He knocked the end off his cigarette and stared for a while at the gas-smoked ceiling.

"Then—one day when the marriage was close at hand, when flags hung from the housetops and garlands across the streets, there was a stir in the house of the cobbler. Gretchen had been sitting to me as a Spanish maid in a mantilla, with a camellia in her hair and on her chest. Dressed so, she was found locked in the arms of the Prince. Both were dead—and the camellia was crushed to brown as you see. It came into my possession with the lace which belonged to me—an art property that is now too entangled with the[Pg 16] human and with the divine ever to be used lightly again."

[Pg 16]

"A sad story," I sighed, turning the leaf. "Poor child, so young and pretty and——"

"Good," he added. "It is astonishing to calculate the amount of virtue which lurks about unlabelled by the wedding ring."

"That," he said, turning over a fresh page, "was once a bunch of violets; it should have belonged to Jacquaine."

"Who was Jacquaine?"

"She was a romantic creature, full of music and passionate inspiration; but she had one fault, that of inventing ideals. Don't you find that most women come to grief over this pastime?"

He scarcely demanded a reply, but went on as though thinking aloud.

"She made a deity of her husband, who was a clever 'cellist, but merely a man. When he became dazzled with a vulgar, opulent, overblown person, Jacquaine would not view it as a temporary fascination. Her soul was not adapted to the analysis of triviality. She ran away from him. Husband-like, he was too[Pg 17] proud or pig-headed—I won't venture to 

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