"Then Maître Raoul escaped Hades, after all?"

"Oh, no! He went there, but merely as a point of honor. He was a gambler, but he always paid his losses."

Adriance laughed, yet winced a little, too. A baffled, helpless bitterness darkened across his expression, as it had done on the evening of their first meeting. He looked down at the pavement as if in fear of accidentally encountering his companion's clear glance.

"I never read that story," he acknowledged. "Thank you."

"I fancy it never was written," she returned. "There is a song about it; a sleepy, creepy song which should never be sung between midnight and dawn."

He watched her draw the thread in and out, for a space. She was embroidering an intricate monogram in the center of a square of fine linen, working with nice exactitude and daintiness.

"What is it?" he wondered, finally.

Her glance traced the direction of his.

"A net for goldfish," she replied.

It was not until long afterward he understood she had told him that she sold her work.

The river glittered, breaking into creamy furrows of foam under the plowing traffic. The sunshine was warm and sank through Adriance with a lulling sense of physical pleasure and tranquil laziness. How bright and clean a world he seemed to view, seated here! He felt a pang of longing, keen as pain when he thought that he might have had such content as this as an abiding state, instead of a brief respite. How had he come to shut himself away from peace, all unaware? How was it that he never had valued the colorless blessing until it was lost?

After a while he fell to envying Maître Raoul, who had gone to the devil honorably.

A long sigh from Holly, slumbering amid his trophies, awoke Adriance to realization that his companion possessed the gift of being silent gracefully. He had not spoken to her for quite half an hour, yet she appeared neither bored nor offended, but as if she had been engaged in following out some pleasant theme of meditation. A sparrow tilted and preened itself on the rail, not a yard from her bent, dark head. Over at the curbstone, the boy who guarded Adriance's horse had slipped the bridle over one arm and was playing marbles with two cheerful comrades who made 

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